Where Troy Once Stood Where Troy Once Stood is a book by Iman Wilkens that argues that the city of Troy waslocated in England and that the Trojan War was fought between groups of Celts. Thestandard view is that Troy is located near the Dardanelles in Turkey. Wilkens claims thatHomer's Iliad and Odyssey, though products of ancient Greek culture, are originally orallytransmitted epic poems from Western Europe. Wilkens disagrees with conventional ideasabout the historicity of the Iliad and the location and participants of the Trojan War. Thetitle of his book comes from the Roman poet Ovid: "Now there are fields where Troy oncestood..." (Latin: Iam seges est, ubi Troia fuit…, Ovid, Heroides 1.1.53)

Gog Magog Hills

Wilkens' argumentsWilkens argues that Troy was located in England on the Gog Magog Downs inCambridgeshire. He believes that Celts living there were attacked around 1200 BC byfellow Celts from the continent to battle over access to the tin mines in Cornwall as tin wasa very important component for the production of bronze.

According to Wilkens, St Michael's Mount is the site of Scylla and Charybdis

1

Wilkens further hypothesises that the Sea Peoples found in the Late Bronze AgeMediterranean were Celts, who settled in Greece and the Aegean Islands as the Achaeansand Pelasgians. They named new cities after the places they had come from and broughtthe oral poems that formed the basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey with them from westernEurope. Wilkens writes that, after being orally transmitted for about four centuries, thepoems were translated and written down in Greek around 750 BC. The Greeks, who hadforgotten about the origins of the poems, located the stories in the Mediterranean, wheremany Homeric place names could be found, but the poems' descriptions of towns, islands,sailing directions and distances were not altered to fit the reality of the Greek setting. Healso writes that "It also appears that Homer's Greek contains a large number of loan words fromwestern European languages, more often from Dutch rather than English, French or German."1

These languages are considered by linguists to have not existed until around 1000 yearsafter Homer. Wilkens argues that the Atlantic Ocean was the theatre for the Odysseyinstead of the Mediterranean. For example: he locates Scylla and Charybdis at present daySt Michael's Mount.

EVIDENCETo support his hypothesis Wilkens uses archaeological evidence, for instance the IslehamHoard in the battlefield, and etymological evidence, for instance the location of Ismaros inBrittany at Ys or the location of Homer's Sidon at Medina Sidonia in Spain. He also arguesthat Homer described locations around the Atlantic, with distinctive topographicalfeatures. He believes that there are similarities in English river names and river names innear Troy in the Iliad and added a "reconstruction" of the Trojan battlefield inCambridgeshire to his 2005 revised edition.

Cádiz: Ithaca?Cádiz would match the description of Ithaca; There is in the land of Ithaca a certainharbour of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and at its mouth two projecting headlandssheer to seaward, but sloping down on the side toward the harbour...

1 http://www.troy-in-england.co.uk/trojan-kings-of-england/trojan-kings-of-england.htm

2

Havana: Telepylos?

Wilkens believes that Havana's topography greatly resembles the description of Telepylos:The harbour, about which on both sides a sheer cliff runs continuously, and projectingheadlands opposite to one another stretch out at the mouth, and the entrance is narrow, ..., andthe ships were moored within the hollow harbour, for therein no wave ever swelled, great orsmall, but all about was a bright calm...... [Odyssey 10, 77–96 ]

SOURCESHere are several sources for his ideas:

Felice Vinci (1995) - The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales Théophile Cailleux2 (1816 – 1890) was a Belgian lawyer, born in Calais in France and theauthor of a work on Homeric geography published in 1878. The title is Pays atlantiquesdécrits par Homère: Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amériques. Théorie nouvelle ("Atlanticlands described by Homer: the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Britain, the Atlantic islands, theAmericas. A new theory"). As the title suggests, Cailleux took the unusual view that thegeographical background to the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey was the coastsof the Atlantic Ocean, and not the shores of the Aegean Sea and Mediterranean Sea. Thebook was published in Paris by Maisonneuve. Théophile Cailleux wrote that Odysseussailed the Atlantic Ocean, starting from Troy, which he situated near the Wash in England(1879). Ernst Gideon (1973), Homerus Zanger der Kelten, Deventer: Ankh-HermesHermann Müller (1843) - Das Nordische Griechentum. Die Urgeschichtliche Bedeutungdes Nordwestlichen EuropasKarel Jozef de Graeve3, member of the Flemish council, wrote that the historical andmythological background of Homer's work should be sought in Western Europe, aroundthe Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta (posthumously, 1806).

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Cailleux 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Jozef_de_Graeve

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The Story Behind Homer's Epics

The false assumption that Troy and the Trojan War was waged near Hissarlik in AsiaMinor (Turkey), where no traces of the Trojan war are found, dates back to the eighthcentury BC when the first Greeks settled on Turkey's west coast. The Greeks did not knowthat the Trojans who once lived in that area were migrants, as the collective memory of thisfact was lost during the Dark Ages (1200-750 BC).

From 1180 to 1100 Hissarlik was indeed inhabited by a non-local people. They were the survivors of the greatest war ofprehistory, when Troy on the Gog Magog Hills inCambridgeshire, England, was destroyed. Here, countlessbronze weapons and other remains of a major war in thelate Bronze Age have been found.

The great migrations of the second millennium BC broughtthe Achaeans, Troy's enemies, from regions along the

Atlantic coast of the Continent to the Mediterranean where they caused the collapse ofmany civilisations. The name 'Achaeans' means 'Watermen' or 'Sea People' (the Gothic'acha' for 'water' or 'stream' is cognate with Latin 'aqua'). The Greek historian Herodotus(fifth century BC) confirms that Pelasgians ('Sea Peoples') had settled in Greece long beforehis time. They founded Athens, renamed places, merged with the local population andadopted their language.

With the Achaeans came their gods and their oral tradition,including the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were writtendown in Greek only around 750 BC. Meanwhile, thenewcomers had engaged in the time-honoured practice ofrenaming towns, rivers and mountains after familiar placesin their former homelands.

The transfer of place-names naturally led to the belief thatthe events described in the epics took place in Greece andthe Mediterranean and that the Achaeans were Greeks.

In this way, the origin of the Trojans and Achaeans wasforgotten while the reality behind the Iliad and the Odyssey

was lost as well. The purpose of the book Where Troy Once Stood (September 2009edition now available expanded and revised - see below) is simply to tell that lost story,the real story behind Homer's epics.

4

A small example of finds at

Cambridge University Museum

The Dictys Trojan War papyrusconfirmed the existence of anearlier one in the Phoenician

alphabet, in use long before theGreek alphabet existed.

This work puts an end to the traditional interpretation of both the Iliad and Odyssey ofHomer, much to the displeasure of many who are unable to counter the basic argumentsof its author and realize that their own ideas and dogma's exploded. On the basis oflinguistic, historical and archaeological evidence it shows that the oldest European epicsdid not originate in Greece but with the Sea Peoples from the coastal areas of WesternEurope, thus radically overturning received wisdom by uncovering the existence of asophisticated Celtic civilisation in the second millennium BC.

Several ancient Greek authors already doubted that Homer's works were of Greek origin,while also some contemporary scholars recognize that the poet had not describedMycenaean culture at all and that Hissarlik in Turkey could not have been the site of thegreat Trojan War as was thought by Schliemann in the 19th century and still today byKorfmann, despite the fact that not a single one of forty characteristics of Troy and theTrojan plain as described by Homer fit the region. By contrast, all these features apply tothe plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills, the archaeological site which owesits name to the most terrible war of prehistory mentioned in the Bible. Here, the names of adozen rivers mentioned in the Iliad can still be recognized, while hundreds of bronzeweapons were found dated to the later Bronze Age, c.1200 BC. The lay-out of thebattlefield is reconstructed in great detail enabling readers henceforth to follow themilitary action in the field. Several features are still extant, such as the war-dikes and thecanal dug to protect the Achaean camp. (see: www.troy-in-england.com).

The war was started by the Achaeans (not the Greeks, an anachronism found in manytranslations of Homer) who were Celts living on the Continent, against the Trojans, whowere Celts living in England. The Achaeans were led by 'wide-ruling' Agamemnon, kingof Argos in northern France a part of which is now called Argonne. His capital city on theSeine, Mycenae, is now called Troyes. According to the analysis of the 'Catalogue of Ships'in book II of the Iliad his allies came from coastal areas situated between Scandinavia andSpain. The king of the Trojans, Priam, was supported by allies from Scotland, Wales,Cornwall and western Brittany. His capital Troy was destroyed but rebuilt by Brutus, thegreat-grandson of Aeneas, on the river Thames on his return from exile in theMediterranean. It was called Caer Troia or Troynovant, present London. The real reasonfor the war was not Helen, but tin from Britain. This metal was urgently needed to makebronze, as the tin-mines on the Continent were exhausted by 1200BC when the war wasabout to start. The origin of all 29 Achaean regiments and 17 Trojan regiments has beenidentified, putting the war on a far larger scale than was hitherto thought possible.

As the Druids had a religious taboo on writing, the story of the war was lost in WesternEurope although it was still known as late as the 16th century that Troy was in Englandaccording to an Irish source. Originally the Iliad was transmitted orally for more than fourcenturies, using metrics to avoid corruption of the text as much as possible. When the SeaPeoples settled in Greece during the Dark Ages (c1200 to c800 BC) the epics were written

5

down in Greek, apparently after translation, as the dactylic hexameter is badly suited tothis language and also because it contains both Ionian and Aeolian dialect, suggesting thatthere has been more than one translator/bard at work, while furthermore the text containsmany loan-words from north-west European languages.

When the Sea Peoples arrived in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, they changed thenames of many places according to Herodotus, who called them Pelasgians (from Greekpelagos meaning 'sea'). In other words, they transferred place-names from Western Europeto the Mediterranean area, just as happened only a few centuries ago when Europeansmigrated to the America's and other parts of the world. This explains why it has alwaysbeen impossible to make sense of Homer's toponomy and geography in the Mediterraneanarea as the ancient Greeks themselves had noticed, and why, for instance, he describedSyria as an island! It appears that historians have made a major error of chronology as thegeographical names in Homer designated quite different places. In the Bronze Age,present Crete, Lesbos, Cyprus, Syria or Egypt were called respectively Kaphtor, Issa,Alashia, Aram and Kemi or Misr.

As to the second epic, the Odyssey, the Greek geographer Strabo already believed thatsome of its ports of call should be sought in the Atlantic, because of the mention of tides. Itnow turns out that none of the action was in the Mediterranean, but that it was an oralmaritime chart of the Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea for use by illiterate Celticseamen. It was composed in such a way that competitors like the Phoenicians would notunderstand where the Celts went trading. The sailing directions were therefore encodedby mentioning episodes related to the Zodiacal signs, e.g. the story involving the twoSirens indicated a course south-south-west (Gemini), while a story about a hunter with abow indicated north-north-east (Sagittarius), and so on. These directions were based onthe situation of the Zodiac at sunset at the spring equinox (taking into account that theZodiac has moved on since the Bronze Age by two signs due to the precession of theequinoxes). Once the author had discovered this system, he was able to retrace the travelsof Odysseus (alias Nanus, a king of Europe's oldest town, Cadiz, south Spain) which infact were a sort of Admiralty Pilots describing also the ports of call or the presence ofdangerous currents. But the Odyssey is also about initiation into the Mysteries, andfurthermore relates a few famous myths whose symbolic meaning is explained here.

Since neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey fit in Greece and the Mediterranean, howeverbiased the translations may be for that purpose, they are usually taken to be the fruit ofpure fantasy. It now appears that the epics were not meant to be 'belles lettres' as wasassumed in the 19th century but to orally pass on knowledge of all sorts, in particulartoponomy, geography, navigation, history, customs, religion and initiation into knowledge.There was no other way to do so at a time when society was wholly illiterate.

BUY: WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD

6

Iman Jacob Wilkens

'WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD'

The Mystery of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey Revealed

Revision of 1990/1 editions byRandom Century and St Martin's Press

New text for Part II, Chapter 1, including thetitlepage and two pages of keys to Maps 2 and 3.

© Iman Jacob Wilkens

The Iliad is quoted inthe authoritative translation of

A.T. MurrayLoeb Classical Library

NOT for any form of reproduction or transmission including the Internetwithout prior written approval from the author Iman Jacob Wilkens

7

Part II

The World of

the Iliad

Be fire with fire;

threaten the threatener,

and outface the brow of bragging horror.

SHAKESPEARE

[ 'Where Troy Once Stood' by I.Wilkens, revised edition; Part II, Chapter 1; page 1 of 22 ]

8

Troy in England

Homer's Troy or Ilion

The first part of this book led to the conclusion that the Trojan War was certainly notfought in the small plain near Hissarlik in Turkey and that the search of Homeric Troy inTurkey is a blind alley. At the same time many reasons were given for seeking Troy in acountry with a temperate climate, and, because of the mention of tides, bordering on theAtlantic. Moreover, since the customs described in the Iliad are typically Celtic, and sinceTroy's enemies, alternatively called Achaeans, Argives or Danaans, were definitely not‘Greeks' (as they are unfortunately called in some translations), the search of Troy shouldfocus on regions in western Europe formerly inhabited by Celts. However, these Celtswere not, as explained elsewhere in this book, the peoples now living on the westernfringes of Europe, but their conquerors originating from the Continent (much like theFrench owe their name to the Franks, a teutonic people that conquered Gaul in the fifthcentury AD). If not for the almost religious belief that Homeric Troy was situated inTurkey, because of its proximity to the Hellespont, Lesbos, Tenedos and Samothrace, and ofcourse also because the story was passed on in ancient Greek, a systematic search for thelegendary city might begin by listing the features of the Troad as described in the Iliad (seebelow). Few of Homer's descriptions bear even the vaguest resemblance to the Hissarlikregion, and yet rather than search elsewhere for a region that actually does fit thedescriptions, scholars have ascribed the mismatch to the poet's fantasy and his utterignorance of geography.

Although it is well-known that European prehistory has known migrations over greatdistances, it was never suspected that the origin of the epics should be sought with thePelasgians, who, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC), were a non-Greek people who had founded Athens and given new geographical names to manyplaces in Greece -which they called Pelasgia- and around the Mediterranean1. As theirGreek name ‘pelasgoi' indicates2, the Pelasgians must have been the mysterious ‘SeaPeoples' who were the terror of the Mediterranean during the second millenium BC.According to the Egyptians they came from the Great Green Sea and visited their countryon an embassy in 1341 BC, followed by several attacks in the 13th century.

Although the Sea Peoples operated from bases in the Mediterranean, it turns out that theyoriginated from various coastal regions in Western Europe, one of which fits all of Homer'sdescriptions of Troy and the Troad, which are the following (with references to the Iliad inbrackets):The long-haired, bright-eyed Achaeans sail in their high-beaked ships to Troyover a sea which is described as winedark (e.g. II,613), grey (e.g. IV,248), misty (XXIII,744)

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or wide (VI,291) and as a tidal ocean (XVIII,399) which is boundless (XXIV, 545), but neveras ‘blue' which would be the more obvious adjective for the Aegean Sea;

1. The sea near Troy is called Oceanus (III,5) or Hellespont (Greek for ‘Helle Sea'; VII,86)and once Thracian Sea (Greek for ‘Sea of the Courageous';XXIII,230);

2. The Troad has a rather temperate oceanic climate (see Part I, Chapter 4);

3. There is a bay wide enough to host an armada (XIV,33) of 1186 ships (II, 494-759);

4. There is a long and very wide sandy beach where the ships are drawn up in rowsbecause of their great number (XIV,35);

5. The enemy base near the seashore was very large (‘the wide camp of the Achaeans',e.g. I,384 and XXIV,199);

7. Achilles could see the rising sun shine over both the sea and the shore near hisbarracks (XXIV,12);

8. The bay opens up to the north, as the ships on the beach are exposed to the strongNorthwind (XIV, 394) and to the dreaded Northwestern gales (IX,4);

9. The plain between Troy and the beach is very wide, judging not only by the longpursuits with horse-drawn war chariots but also by the long way King Priam had togo from Troy to the Achaean camp (XXIV,349-351);

10. The ‘broad land Troy' (XXIV,494) is extensive enough to include the twenty-threetowns sacked by Achilles (IX,329);

11. The Trojan plain is exceptionally fertile (II,467-472; XII,313; XVIII,67);

12. The country is not only rich in horses (XX,221) but there are also cattle, sheep, swineand goats (e.g.XXIII,30);

13. The Ida woods with their many springs (VIII,47) and oak forests (XXIII,117) are atsome distance from Troy (XXIV,663);

14. Nine rivers, mentioned by name, flow through the Trojan plain, rising in theregion's hills (XII,20);

15. Simultaneous flooding by eight of these rivers swept away the Achaean campwallafter the war (XII,18);

16. The ninth river, the Satnioïs, apparently did not contribute to the wall's destruction(VI,34) and therefore must have had a separate flood plain;

17. Despite their great number, none of these rivers seems to flow across the battlefield,as Trojan horses run, after the death of their charioteers, on their own from the

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Achaean camp back to Troy (XI,159);

18. The river Simoïs flows into the Scamander (V,775);

19. The river Scamander, borders the battlefield to the west (XI,497);

20. The burial mound of King Ilus, an ancestor of King Priam, was situated near theright bank of the Scamander, at some distance from Troy (XXIV,349);

21. Near Ilus' barrow, there was a ford in the river Scamander on the way to the Achaeancamp (XXIV,692);

22. Troy was built on a height (XV,71) wide enough for a ‘big city' (Greek: mega astu,II,332) with ‘wide streets' (Greek: euru-aguia, II,329);

23. Troy is not situated on a river, as one can go around its walls without crossing anywatercourse (XXII,165);

24. The city had not stone, but earthen walls (XX,145) which merely were reinforcedwith stones (XII,29) and timbers;

25. Not far from the Scaean or ‘West' gates of the city are two springs (XXII,152), onehot, one cold (XXII,152);

26. The waters of these springs flow into the Scamander (XXII,148);

27. When Achilles pursues Hector on a ‘trackway' leading from the Scaean Gates to thesprings, they pass by a hillock (XXII,145);

28. Not far from Troy are marshes where horses graze (XX,221);

29. The Trojans and their allies formed up in battle order on a mound in the plain somedistance from the city (II,811).This mound, called Batieia (often translated as ThornHill), was the barrow of the amazon Myrina (II,813);

30. This barrow had a view ‘on either side' of the plain (II,812), suggesting that it wassituated on or near some kind of ridge or partition on the battlefield;

31. In the Greek version of the Iliad several times mention is made of wardykes in theplain between Troy and the Achaean camp (VIII,553;XI,160;XX,427);

32. Zeus watched the battles from a height of Ida, the Gargarus (VIII,48);

33. The Callicolone, the hill of the judgement of Paris, from where the wargod Aresfollowed the battles (XX,151), was situated on the river Simoïs (XX,53);

34. Poseidon followed the events from the highest hill of Samothrace (XIII,12);

35. A burial mound was built for Patroclus near the seashore (XXIII,164);

36. Tenedos was an island near the Troad (I,38);

37. Samos and Imbros (which are not described as islands in the Greek version) were

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situated on either side of the bay where the Achaean camp was (XXIV,78);

38. The Troad was situated on the Hellespont, between the island of Lesbos and thehighlands of Phrygia (XXIV,544-545), discussed in Chapter 4;

39. Troy had a large hinterland from where the Trojan's allies originated (II,803;X,417);

40. The Achaeans and Trojans had the same language, but other languages wererepresented among the Trojan allies (II,804).

The Troad on the Ocean

As the Mediterranean Sea, was never called ‘Oceanus' by the Greeks, the Troad should besought near the Atlantic Ocean which, because of its substantial tidal movements, wascalled the ‘backward-flowing Oceanus' (apsorro-os okeanos, XVIII,399, often translatedincorrectly as ‘circling ocean'). The Greek poet Aeschylus (6th-5th century BC) mentionedsurging tides also at Aulis, from where the Achaean invasion fleet departed (see Chapter15: The fleet in Aulis, Denmark, and Explanatory Note 14: Iphigenia in Aulis). A logicalcandidate for the Troad is England, where the wide bay of the Wash is ideally suited tohost a large fleet. As early as 1879 the French-born Belgian lawyer Théophile Cailleuxwrote that Troy was situated in East Anglia where he had noted two huge wardykes southof the Wash. Here, he identified the river Cam with the Iliad's Scamander and the riverGreat Ouse with Homer's Simoïs and deduced Troy's location on the heights outsideCambridge known as the Gog Magog Hills3.However, Cailleux did not continue hisresearch as he was confronted with a major problem: if Troy were in England, where hadall the 29 regiments of Achaeans, Argives and Danaans come from? (from Scandinavia tosouth Spain, see Chapters 5-10). And where was Mycenae, the capital of their Commander-in-Chief Agamemnon? (in France, see Chapter 11). Cailleux was on the right track but hehad too few arguments for a break-through in conventional thinking. And to make mattersworse, a Roman coin was found under one of the dykes, but that does not mean that notraces remain of the wardykes mentioned in the Iliad.

The Rivers of the Troad

As most of Europe's rivernames are very ancient, one might hope to find someresemblance between the rivernames of Homer's Troad and those of Cambridgeshire, ifTroy actually was in England as Cailleux believed. Homer mentions nine rivers in theTrojan plain, and many others elsewhere in the Troad but until now it was always thoughtthat these names were the fruit of the poet's imagination, in particular because there arefar too many of them for the small plain of Hissarlik. This might be the reason why E.Zangger, in search of Atlantis in Turkey, and naturally assuming that Troy - which is

12

linked to Atlantis in mythology – was Hissarlik, omitted all rivernames from the followingcitation from the Iliad without even informing the reader of this omission4. Yet it isprecisely these quaint prehistoric river names that are essential for the search for Troy'slocation, as these rivers can still be identified in England today.

Here follows the passage describing how eight rivers swept away the Achaean camp wallafter the war because ‘no offerings had been made to the gods during its construction':

But when…the city of Priam was sacked in the tenth year, and the Argives had gone back in theirships to their dear native land, then verily did Poseidon and Apollo take counsel to sweep away thewall, bringing against it the might of all the rivers that flow forth from the mountains of Ida to thesea – Rhesus and Heptaporus and Caresus and Rhodius, and Granicus and Aesepus, and goodlyScamander, and Simoïs, by the banks whereof many shields of bull's hide and many helms fell inthe dust, and the race of men half-divine – all of these did Phoebus Apollo turn the mouths together,and for nine days' space he drave their flood against the wall ; and Zeus rained ever continually, thatthe sooner he might whelm the wall in the salt sea. And the Shaker of Earth, bearing his trident in hishands, was himself the leader, and swept forth upon the waves all the foundations of beams andstones, that the Achaeans had laid with toil, and made all smooth along the strong stream of theHellespont, and again covered the great beach with sand, when he had swept away the wall ; andthe rivers he turned back to flow in the channel, where aforetime they had been wont to pour theirfair streams of water. Thus were Poseidon and Apollo to do in the aftertime…. (XII,17-35)

If we assume that the Iliad is a dramatized account of historical events, we must alsoexplain how floods could wipe out a long earthen wall over its full length in a very shorttime. This appears to be perfectly possible provided there is a particular configuration ofwatercourses, as we will find hereafter.

The river Scamander was also ‘called Xanthus by the gods'(XX, 74). The Iliad mentions aninth river in the Trojan plain: the Satnioïs (VI,34 ;XIV,445 ;XXI,87). Further away was theCaystrius (II,461) while there was still another river at ‘great distance from Troy', theAxius (II,849). Finally, the Odyssey mentions a river called Temese (1,184).

Upon examination, one finds more than a vague resemblance with the British rivernamesas it appears that Homer's rivernames have survived virtually intact after some 3200 yearsand despite Britain's numerous foreign invasions and extensive linguistic evolution (seethe corresponding numbers on Map 2) :

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(Map 2: Troy In England)

Ancient Greekname

Usualrendering

Modernname

1 RHEsos RHEsus RHEE2 Heptaporos

(= ‘seven fords')Heptaporus Hiz and Ivel

(have seven fords)3 KARESos CARESus KARESdic in the Middle Ages,

now CAR Dike4 RHODIos RHODIus RODIng (4a) or

Kennett (4b)5 GRENicos GRANicus GRANta6 AISEpos AESEpus ISE (6a) or Lark (6b)7 SCAMandrios SCAMander CAM8 SimOEIS SimOÏS Great OUSe9 SatniOEIS SatniOÏS Little OUSe10 KAÜSTRios CAYSTER Yare (near

CAISTER-on-Sea)11 AXIos AXIus EXE12 TEMESE TEMESE TEMES (in 843),

THAMES

14

Despite their age and transcription into ancient Greek, the prehistoric rivernames showsuch a high degree of similarity with those of actual rivers in England both individuallyand as a group, that there can be little doubt that Troy was situated in Cambridgeshire. Therandom geographic order in which the poet listed the rivers in his epic can be explainedby the requirements of meter. A more serious problem is that some rivers have changedcourse in the lowlands known as ‘Fenlands' or have been canalized, while the Karesos hasdisappeared altogether.

This is not surprising in a landscape which has been subject to important changes overtime, either by nature or human intervention. In some places the soil has sunk severalmeters due to the drainage of marshes, peat shrinkage, peat burning and turf cutting whilethe silting up of the Wash has moved the shore nearly forty kilometers farther north. Theregion has changed to such an extent that we must rely on historical reconstructions bygeographers5.

Among the rivers, a particular problematic case is the Karesos, the present Car Dike, anextinct river which was canalized in Roman times and which was still called ‘Karesdic' inthe medieval Danelaw Charter. As its watercourse has dried up over time, only a smallpart of the ancient river is retraceable in Cambridgeshire.

The Heptaporos (Greek for ‘seven fords') could well be the river Hiz, which continues asthe Ivel before running into the Great Ouse because it did have seven fording places closetogether at Ickleford, Langford, Biggleswade, Stratford, Girtford, Tempsford en Barford6.Of these, Ickleford is situated on the prehistoric Icknield Way, a road running fromAvebury in the southwest to Norfolk in the northeast which would have existed inHomer's time.

The Rhodios, one of the eight rivers that washed away the Achaean campwall, cannot bethe present Roding as this river flows south to the Thames. But Rhodios could have beenthe name of a northwards flowing roddon now called the Kenneth, as ancientwatercourses in the Fenlands are still called roddons or rodhams.

Phonetically, the Aisepos has survived as the Ise. But it flows into the Nene too far west ofCambridge to be the river meant by Homer. There is, however, reason to think that theriver Lark was meant which flows east of the Cambridge plain, because Homer specifiesthat the Aesepus rises ‘from the nethermost foot of Ida' (II,824). The Ida, meaning ‘woods',are the hills that bounded Troy on the south and east. The Lark does indeed rise from thespurs of the hills around Cambridge, near Bury St Edmunds. Parts of these hills are stillcovered with forests known as ‘Ditton Woods'. Homer also says that the locals ‘drink the

15

black water of Aesepus' (II,825), and it could well be that the villages Drinkstone andBlackthorpe near Bury St Edmunds are reminders of ancient rituals associated with theAesepus.

We may infer that the Simoeis would be the Great Ouse because the goddess Hera stayedher horses where this river joins the Scamandrios (V,775), the present Cam. The Satnioeiswas then the Little Ouse, a river that was not part of the group of eight rivers that washedaway the Achaean campwall, as it flowed into the Wash northeast of the camp.

The region of the ‘streams of Kaüstrios' which the poet described as being particularlyrich in fowl, including cranes, is the wide estuary of the Yare in Norfolk with its many birdsanctuaries. The Yare was called the ‘Gariennos' by Ptolemy in the 1st century AD and‘Gerne' in the Middle Ages. These names are cognate with the word for ‘crane' in bothGreek (geranos) and Welsh (garan). These days the cranes are rather rare here because ofthe draining of marshes and agricultural development. But the Homeric name ‘Caystrius'(or ‘Cayster') is preserved in the region by Caister-on-Sea, Caister Castle and Caistor StEdmund.

The ‘wide-flowing Axios' being ‘far from Troy' in allied territory (II,849) must be the mile-wide river Exe in Devonshire, Southwest England.

Regarding the Temese, which is mentioned only in the Odyssey (1,184), Homer supplies noinformation as to its location. It is very likely that the Thames is meant not only because itwas called Tamesis in Roman times and Temes in the Middle Ages but also because bronzewas traded here, produced with tin from Cornwall, which was the only major source ofthe metal left in Europe by 1200 BC, a fatal circumstance which would eventually – afternine years of preparation - lead to the Trojan War.

In Turkey, only a few rivers were given names from the Iliad, but without regard to theparticular configuration described in the epic. Besides, they are flowing wide apart invarious regions of the country, invalidating the scene of the Achaean campwall beingswept away by the combined force of eight rivers (see Map 1b in Part I, Chapter 1). As theTroad's group of rivers cannot be found elsewhere in Europe, the ‘broad plain of Troy'must have been the wide plain in Cambridgeshire.

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(Map 1a: Traditional site of Troy in Turkey - zoomed in)

(Map 1a: Traditional site of Troy in Turkey - zoomed out)

The War Dykes

Every now and then the ‘riddle of the dykes' is brought up in the regional press as thepublic often wonders about the origin and purpose of the two enormous dykes northeastof Cambridge, called the Fleam Dyke and the Devil's Dyke or Devil's Ditch. (In additionthere are the smaller Bran or Heydon Ditch, and the Brent and Mile Ditches, built asbarriers on the prehistoric Icknield Way). As these dykes obviously have no hydraulicfunction they may have had a military purpose by forming a barrier linking the river Camto the west to dense forests on the hills to the east. The plain itself had already been

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cleared around 2000BC according to archaeological research. Although the dykes andditches seem to be meant as barriers to horse-drawn war chariots, it was never clear forwhich war. The dykes were not mentioned by Roman historians as they were probably ofno use to the Roman army. But after the discovery of a Roman coin and potsherds underone part of the Fleam Dyke, the earthworks were believed to date from the time of thetribal warfare between the Mercians and the East Angles in the sixth and seventh centuryAD. Although this has been confirmed by radio-carbon dating of parts of the Fleam Dyke 7,elements of much older earthworks seem to have been used in the most eastern part of thedyke where a few potsherds of the early and middle Bronze Age were found. Thearchaeologist Prof. McKenny Hughes therefore preferred to speak of ‘multi-period dykes'while more recently Alison Taylor cautiously concluded that ‘though most defensivedykes in Cambridgeshire have been shown to be Anglo-Saxon in their final phase, theyoften seem to be preceded by Iron Age works, and elsewhere in East Anglia they arecommonly Iron Age in date. This is also a strong possibility for the Fen Ditton example'8

(Fen Ditton, or High Ditch, is the western part of the Fleam Dyke near the Cam). It couldwell be that the dykes are late Bronze Age in their very first phase but that they had beenpartly set, eroded and levelled by the fifth century AD when they were reconstructed bythe invading Anglo-Saxons for their wars with the Mercians. Seen from the air, cropmarksshow a former extension of the Fleam Dyke which might well be very ancient but which isnow ploughed under. What remains today of the Devil's Dyke and the Fleam Dyke arestretches with a length of 12 and 6 kilometers respectively, an average height of 5 metersand a ditch about 4 meters deep. The overall width of the dykes and the ditches combinedis about 30 meters at the base. A large army must have been at work to construct the twodykes which run parallel at a distance of 10 kilometers (see Map 3). The ditches dug infront of the dykes are on the side facing inland, which means that they were built byinvaders and not by defenders of the territory. Since Homer is quite familiar with dykes,which he calls 'the splendid works of young men' the original construction might date tothe Trojan War. As he gives us to understand that the Achaeans controlled the plain duringthe first years of the war (which are unfortunately not described in the Iliad) to the extentthat the Trojans hardly ventured out of their city, the invaders had the leisure to build thedykes. The poet has two different words for 'dyke' depending on their function: First,there is the teichos, an earthen wall reïnforced with joint stakes (skolopessi érérei), andcompleted with towers (purgos) of wooden beams (XII,36)9. This type of dyke served asdefense of both Troy and the Achaean camp. The wall of Troy, which is described onlyonce (XX,145), was a dyke (teichos) of earth 'heaped up from two sides' (amphichutos). It hadhigh wooden gates while the wooden stakes that completed the defensive walls - whetherTrojan or Achaean - were sharp enough to receive the severed head of a slain enemy(XVIII,176). Contrary to what is generally believed, Homer does not say that Troy had awall of stone, but that stones were used to reïnforce the earthen wall in front of theAchaean camp (XII,29). Only once is this wall described as 'laïnos' which therefore shouldnot be translated as 'of stone' but 'reïnforced with stones' (XII,178). As walls of stone arenot mentioned in the Iliad, it must be obvious that Homer described a culturalenvironment very different from that of Hissarlik and the Mediterranean in general.

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(Map 3: The Battlefield of Troy)

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Second, there are the gephura, dykes without palissades10. Homer distinguishes riverdykes(potamou gephura), which are occasionally swept away by floods (V, 89), and, as we haveseen above, dykes of battle (ptolemoio gephura), which had a ditch (taphros) on one side.These wardykes figure very seldom in translations of the Iliad probably because there is noexplanation for them in the plain of Hissarlik, but they are essential in finding the exactlocation of Troy in Cambridgeshire. One day, when the Trojans attacked the camp near thesea with their horse-drawn chariots, they were slaughtered by the Achaeans, so that thefrightened horses ran with their empty chariots over the wardykes back to Troy. Literallytranslated, the relevant passage reads as follows :

Even beneath Agamemnon, son of Atreus, fell the heads of the Trojans as they fled, and many horseswith high-arched necks rattled empty cars over the dykes of battle lacking their peerlesscharioteers, who were lying upon the ground dearer far to the vultures than to their wives. (XI,158-162)

Unfortunately, most translations deny the readers the dramatic image of the terrifiedhorses running with their empty chariots 'over the wardykes' (ana ptolemoio gephuras) backto Troy. Prof. Murray rendered the text as: 'along the dykes of battle' as he obviously couldnot figure out the situation in the region of Hissarlik. This may explain why otherstranslate gephura by 'battlefield', 'the space between the armies', 'the boundaries of thebattlefield' or… nothing at all ! But since the Greek 'ana' means 'over','on' or 'above', therecan be no doubt that the frightened horses ran over the dykes back to Troy and thisgripping scene comes fully alive in the plains near Cambridge. Homer also recounts howone night groups of Trojan warriors were camping around fires both in the plain and also– but again usually not in translations - on the wardykes (VIII,553). Since no traces ofpalissades have been found near the Devil's dyke and the Fleam dyke, they mustoriginally have served as barriers to the horse-drawn battle chariots.

Troy on the Gog Magog Hills

If the dykes in the plain near Cambridge were originally the wardykes mentioned in theIliad it is not difficult to find the hills on which the 'steep and windy city of Troy' with its'wide streets' was situated: on the Gog Magog Hills south of the Fleam Dyke and a fewmiles southeast of Cambridge. The peculiar name of the hills is a reminder of the mostterrible war of prehistory to which the prophet Ezekiel seems to have referred as awarning to the people of Israël11. He mentioned an attack by an alliance of peoples wearingarmour and accompanied by horses, under the command of Gog, King of Magog, wichprovoked such carnage that the birds came to feed on the flesh and blood of kings andheroes. It is not unlikely that the prophet had the Trojan War in mind as countless humanbones and bronze weapons were found in the region of the Gog Magog Hills as silent

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witnesses of a great war nobody remembers. The Bible mentions Gog and Magog again inthe Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse, usually ascribed to St John, whichannounces the final war of humanity:

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out todeceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather themtogether to battle : the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth ofthe earth, and compassed the camp of the Saints about, and the beloved city : and fire came downfrom God out of heaven, and devoured them. (Revelation 20, 7-9)

The earliest mention of the biblical name Gog Magog for the hills near Cambridge is foundin a decree of 1574 forbidding students to visit the Gog Magog Hills on pain of a fine. Thehills form a plateau culminating at a height of about 80 meter above sea level. With some 8square kilometers there is enough room for a large city. The town was not situated on ariver but water was available from many sources at the foot of the hills, in particular atSpringfield near Cherry Hinton. Two millenia ago, when Hissarlik was a thriving Romantown, Ovid wrote: 'Now there are fields where Troy once stood !'12. He may therefore wellhave referred to the Gog Magog Hills which were, and still are, covered with fields. Thismay explain why the exceptional historical importance of the site was not recognized andarchaeological research intermittent and fragmentary. Excavations at the foot of the hillsrevealed the remains of defenses at Copley Hill and Cherry Hinton. Both are not olderthan Iron Age, although the sites themselves are now known to have been occupiedalready in the Bronze Age13 (see Map 3, keys 19 and 23). These hillforts are hardly visibletoday, but in the middle of the Gog Magog Hills there is the better-preserved hillfortknown as the Wandlebury Ring which is situated in a public park. This fort had severalconcentric ditches and earthen walls which were kept in place by wooden palissades.Many, often mutilated, skeletons were found here - some of exceptionally tall people – aswell as bronze and iron objects and pottery, including 'Knobbed Ware' dating from theBronze Age. Although the earliest defenses date only to the late Iron Age, as the first ditchwas constructed as late as the third century BC, Wandlebury was already inhabited in theBronze Age and even a very important site in Homer's time as we will now see.

Pergamus on Wandlebury Ring

The 'acropolis' or 'high citadel' of Troy was called the 'Pergamus', the word being cognatewith 'berg' in the Germanic languages, meaning 'height' or 'mountain'. The Pergamus musttherefore have been the highest part of the Gog Magog Hills where is now the WandleburyRing at a height of 74 meter, culminating at 80 meter on the north side where is now the'Telegraph Clump' which offers a full view on the plain. Here, Apollo was believed to havewatched the battles from Pergamus (V,460 and VII,21). From the same spot Cassandra sawher father return from the Achaean camp with the corpse of Hector lying in the waggon

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(XXIV,700). Not only the sanctuaries of Athene and Apollo were situated on the Pergamusbut also Priam's palace with its colonnades and 50 rooms with polished stones (VI,242ff)as well as the homes of Hector and Paris (VI,503-516). Since the Pergamus was originallysituated inside the city's walls there was no need for separate defenses (see Map 3, key 20).This explains why the remains of the defenses of the Wandlebury Ring date only from thelate Iron Age, a full millenium after the destruction of Troy, when the former Pergamuswas turned into a small hillfort. According to the archaeologist Alison Taylor recentexcavations in- and outside the fortifications show 'abundant evidence for occupationaround the fort, suggesting that there was an early undefended settlement here before thebanks and ditches were constructed. Numerous pits dated to the early and late Iron Ageand postholes showed that a variety of buildings stood here'14. The name Wandlebury wasmentioned for the first time as 'Wandlebiria' in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia Imperialia of 1211,in which the author recounts an old legend of a mysterious knight on horseback 15. In the18th century a mansion was built on Wandlebury by Lord Godolphin who gave his name tothe 'Godolphin Arabian', the ancestor of many modern racing horses. Without realising it,his lordship continued the tradition of the 'horse-taming Trojans' on the selfsame spotwhere King Priam's palace once stood, whose ancestor, King Erichthonius, owned 3000horses according to Homer. Unfortunately, the Wandlebury site has much changedbecause of the extensive landscaping done around the mansion, which was eventuallydemolished in 1955. Today only the outbuildings and the stables remain.

The City of Troy's Population

How big was the 'well-peopled city of Priam'? The number of inhabitants of the 'great cityof holy Ilion' can be estimated by combining various indications given by Homer. To startwith the number of enemy warriors: the Achaean army must have counted about 100.000men, based on the number of ships multiplied by the average number of warriors in eachas given in the 'Catalogue of Ships' in Book II of the Iliad. Although some consider thisnumber exaggerated for the time, it is fully consistent with the Iliad's repeated referencesto the presence of a myriad warriors. What is more, the thousands of pieces of bronzearmor and weapons found in the plains near Cambridge as well as the construction of thewardykes here do suggest the presence of a huge army. By contrast, the Trojan army wasmuch smaller, counting about 50.000 men including their allies as Homer reports (VIII,562). The number of warriors living with their families inside the walls of Troy (Hector'sregiment ; see Part IV) was estimated by the poet at much less than ten percent of theAchaean army (II, 123-133), say 7.000 men. In peacetime the city would therefore havecounted some 50.000 inhabitants when including the women, the childern, the elderly, thedisabled, the support troops and the slaves. During the war most of the allied troops hadtheir quarters in the city, but they did not bring their families according to Homer (withthe possible exception of the regiment of Dardanians who originally lived in the nearbyIda woods, now the Ditton Woods). The influx of allied troops nearly doubled the

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population to some 100.000 by the end of the war. The city's congestion by a 'multitude ofmen' (V,202) explains the king's remark to Achilles that the population was 'cooped up inthe city' (XXIV,663). The famous story of Achilles chasing Hector three times around thewalls of Troy (XXII, 165) cannot be explained in England where the city on the Gog Magoghills was too big for such an exploit. It appears that Homer made up the story to glorify hishero for the home front as Dictys Cretensis told a very different and much less heroic storyin his 'Ephemeris belli troiani' (The Diary of the Trojan War). In fact Achilles killed Hectorin an ambush, captured another son of Priam, hacked off both his hands and sent him toTroy to tell the news.

From the Scaean Gates to the Springs

Since Odysseus and Menelaus had been on a diplomatic mission to Troy before the war(III,205), the town was well known to the Achaeans, while during the conflict intelligencecould be gathered from prisoners. Homer could therefore easily imagine for instanceHector and Paris walking down from the Pergamus to the Scaean Gates (meaning ‘Left' or‘West' gates, the plural referring to the double doors). These gates are identical with theDardanian Gates, as the Greek scholar Aristarchos already observed in the second centuryBC, and it is in fact implicit in Homer's text. Since the Scaean gates overlooked thebattlefield to the north (see e.g. III,145ff and XXII,194 or 413), they must have been thenorthwestern entrance to Troy. There were no doubt more gates to the city and animpression of what they looked like was discovered recently when a Bronze Age site westof the Gog Magog Hills was excavated, with ditches, palissade lines and an elaborateentranceway about 5 meter in width. A series of beam slots indicated the presence of awooden structure while traces on the chalk suggested the passage of foot traffic16. On thenorthwest side of the town, which suffered most of the Achaean attacks (VI,433), Achillespursued Hector on a waggon track leading from the Scaean gates past a hillock (skopie) tothe washing basins of the Trojan women. The basins were made of polished stones andsituated near two springs feeding into the Scamander, a hot and a cold one (XXII,143-157).The mention of springs west of the city was always considered as one of the mostsignificant topographical features in Homer for the location of Troy (but not found nearHissarlik). It so happens that there are many strong cold water springs west of the GogMagog Hills, while hot water may have been generated either by volcanic activity or by theadjacent limekiln. Going from the approximate site of the Scaean gates on the Gog MagogHills (see Map 3, key 21) and indeed passing by a hillock, the Missleton hill (key 22), onesoon arrives at the springs which now provide Cambridge with drinking water (key 23).The huge reservoirs of the town's Water Company stand in part on the earlier mentionedhillfort of Cherry Hinton, also known as the "War Ditches". As described in the Iliad, thewaters of the springs flow into the Scamander, the present Cam (via the Cherry HintonBrook and the Coldham Brook, key 24). Some springs have been sealed over in the pastbut north of the reservoirs a spring can still be seen ouzing to the surface at the crossing of

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the Cambridge Road and the Cherry Hinton Road. Nearby are limestone quarries (whencethe ‘polished stones') but unfortunately the whole site has by now been destroyed by theWater Company and a cement company. In 1903 Prof. McKenny Hughes had discoveredhere, in addition to bronze objects and pottery, the remains of a massacre, as many bodiesof both young and old of either sex had been thrown into a ditch.

Batieia, the Barrow of Myrina

According to Homer, there was a burial mound far away in the plain in front of the city, adetail that provides additional evidence that Troy was situated on the Gog Magog Hills :

Now there is before the city a steep mound afar out in the plain, with a clear space about it on thisside and that ; this do men verily call Batieia, but the immortals call it the barrow of Myrina, light ofstep. There on this day did the Trojans and their allies separate their companies. (II, 811-815)

About five kilometers from the Gog Magog Hills there is effectively an isolated mound inthe plain, situated on the Fleam Dyke (see Map 3). This dyke would explain why thebarrow had ‘a clear space on both sides' or, as the Greek says : entha kai entha, ‘on this sideand that'. The mound is now called Mutlow Hill, from Old English moot, a place ofgathering *.It was still in use as a meeting place in Anglo-Saxon times, judging by thetraces seen from the air of chariotwheels converging on the mound. The barrow, whichdates from the middle Bronze Age, was investigated in the nineteenth century by the Rev.R.C. Neville who discovered, among the remains of burials, glass beads from the easternMediterranean dating from around 1500 BC. This confirms that the tomb existed inHomer's time and that the British Isles had contacts with Mediterranean countries as earlyas the middle Bronze Age. As to Batieia, this was the name ‘humans gave to the divineMyrina'. She was a queen of the Amazons who, according to classical mythology, haddefeated with a big army the people of Atlantis who lived on the shores of the Ocean in aland of which it was said that the gods were born17. She was believed to have been the wifeof King Dardanus, an ancestor of Priam of Troy. One may wonder why the armiesassembled in the plain to engage in battle as the war might have lasted only a few monthsif the Achaeans had laid siege to the city. The reason must be that the Achaeans ran therisk of an attack in the rear by the allies of the Trojans who arrived from all over England,Scotland, Wales and Brittany (as we will see in the following chapters). Another reason iseven more important: if the Achaeans left their camp, their fleet could be destroyed byTrojan allies coming in from regions east and west of the Wash. The warring partiestherefore engaged in battle only during the day, pursuing each other with their chariotsover the great plain between the Gog Magog Hills and the coast. Sometimes the battleraged close to the river Cam which borders the plain to the west (called ‘left' by Homerwho explains that ‘the left is where the sun sets, the right is toward the dawn' (XII, 240) :

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Nor did Hector as yet know aught thereof, for he was fighting on the left of all the battle by thebanks of the river Scamander, where chiefly the heads of warriors were falling, and a cryunquenchable arose, round about great Nestor and warlike Idomeneus. (XI, 497-501)

It is unlikely that the fighting took place on a daily basis for ten years on end, and it seemsthat there were indeed periods of weeks, months and even years that nothing muchhappened around Troy according to the classical authors Dares and Dictys, allowingAchilles to sack many cities in the region.

The Barrow of Ilus

The Iliad provides useful indications of the location of the barrow of King Ilus, the founderof Troy and grandfather of King Priam. To begin with, it is said that the frightened Trojanhorses mentioned above ‘sped over the midst of the plain past the tomb of ancient Ilus' (XI,166). Elsewhere we read that ‘Hector is holding council by the tomb of godlike Ilus, awayfrom the turmoil' (X, 415) in a quiet area ‘clear of corpses' where he assembled his troopsfor an attack on the Achaean camp (VIII,489; see H on Map 3). Finally, it appears from thefollowing citation that the barrow of King Ilus was situated near the right bank of the riverScamander at great distance from Troy. When King Priam and his squire are on their wayto Achilles' barracks in the Achaean camp with a ransom for the corpse of Hector, theymust have covered a considerable distance when the night had set in. They thereforedecide to make a halt past the barrow of Ilus :

Now when the others had driven past the great barrow of Ilus, they halted the mules and the horsesin the river to drink ; for darkness was by now come down over the earth. (XXIV, 349-351)

About where this barrow might be, there is today the hamlet of Barway, situated on theright bank of the Cam and a few miles south of Ely, a town on the west bank. As Barwaywas called ‘beorg-eg' in Old English, meaning 'barrow island'*, it is the most likely placefor Ilus' barrow, the more so as the latter should be situated near a ford in the riverXanthus (Scamander) where King Priam crosses the river (XXIV, 692). This ford in the Cammust have been situated near the village of Little Thetford, the latter name being OldEnglish for ‘chief ford'* (see Map 3, key 28). The second leg of King Priam's journey (see KPon Map 3) in the company of a safe-conduct, poetically described as Hermes, thus led himto the western extremity of the camp where Achilles' barracks were situated. This complieswith Homer's remark that ‘Achilles and Ajax of Telamon had drawn up their shapely shipson the extreme flanks trusting in their valour and in the strength of their hands' (VIII, 224-226). The ford, in which traces of a Bronze Age trackway have been found in 1935, ismentioned again when Achilles and his troops managed to reach the spot in acounterattack, cutting the Trojan force in two. One part was driven toward the city across

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the fields, and another part chased into the river (XXI,1-10; see A on Map 3). Although KingIlus was buried not far from the town of Ely, it is unlikely that this city owes its name tohim nor, as the locals believe, to the eels which are abundant in the region and alreadymuch appreciated in the time of Homer who spoke of ‘eel and fish'. It rather appears thatthe Isle of Ely, which was still an island in the early Bronze Age, when the sea reachedeven further inland, was called ‘El-ge' in 730AD* meaning ‘Elle-land' or ‘land in the HelleSea', Homer's ‘boundless' Hellespont, which was the ancient name of the North Sea as wewill find in Chapter 4.

The Location of the Achaean Camp

In the late Bronze Age the Wash reached nearly as far inland as Littleport, the beach beingonly about 35 kilometers distant from the Gog Magog Hills. But this distance has doubledover time to 70 kilometers due to the silting up of the bay, resulting in a flat landscapeknown as the Fenlands, so that today's coastline is found near the town of King's Lynn.But 3200 years ago the shore of the Wash ran approximately from Littleport via BrandonBank and Feltwell Anchor to Shippea Hill, so that the river Little Ouse, Homer's Satnioïs,reached the sea north of the Achaean camp (see Map 3). For this reason the poet did not listit among the rivers that ultimately swept away the campwall. The Achaean ships musttherefore have been beached close to left bank of the now canalised part of the Little Ouse.

Since the camp was situated on the southern shore of the bay, the ships and barracks wereexposed to the northern gales blowing from the sea:

And the sea surged up to the huts and ships of the Argives […] not so loudly bellows the wave ofthe sea upon the shore, driven up from the deep by the dread blast of the North Wind. (XIV,393-395)

Although the shore was some ten kilometers wide, the 1186 ships were drawn up in rowson the beach between the two headlands :

Far apart from the battle were their ships drawn up on the shore of the grey sea […] For albeit thebeach was wide, yet might it in no wise hold all the ships, and the host was straitened ; whereforethey had drawn up the ships row behind row, and had filled up the wide mouth and all the shorethat the headlands shut in between them. (XIV, 30-36)

[ 'Where Troy Once Stood' by I.Wilkens, revised edition; Part II, Chapter 1; page 13 of 22 ]

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Homer calls the sea near the Troad often ‘Oceanus' (e.g. III,5 or VII,422) or ‘Hellespont' andonce the ‘Thracian Sea'. The latter name seems most surprising, but it can still bedemonstrated that Lincolnshire was once among the many European regions called‘Thrace' as we find here the towns of Threckingham and the medieval Tric - now thecoastal town of Skegness - whose names come from the Old Norse ‘threkr' and OldEnglish ‘thraec'* which are both cognate with ancient Greek ‘thrasus', meaning‘courageous'. Therefore, ‘Thrace' means something like ‘Land of courageous men' andLincolnshire was one of them. The northwestern gales blowing from this region stir up thewaves of the Wash against the Achaean camp to the southeast:

Even as two winds stir up the teeming deep, the North Wind and the West Wind that blow fromThrace, coming suddenly, and forthwith the dark wave reareth itself in crests and casteth muchtangle out along the sea ; even so were the hearts of the Achaeans rent within their breasts. (IX, 4-6)

And the winds went back again to return to their home over the Thracian sea, and it roared withsurging flood. (XXIII, 230)

The bay is described not only as wide, but also as situated deep inland, thebarracks standing ‘before the deep coastline' (proparoithe éïonos batheiés). Prof. Murray'stranslation by ‘low coastline' is wrong, but the French version by Prof. Lasserre is veryprecise : 'baraques devant le rivage profond' (This shows once more the importance of anaccurate translation for the location of Troy).

The Wall of the Achaean Camp

As there is in the Iliad no evidence of a river flowing through the camp, the river Cam musthave been its western border, the eastern border being the old course of the Kenneth andthe Lark. In the Bronze Age the latter two rivers did not cross the main battlefield as isnow the case after canalisation of the Lark, but straight north where they reached the seaeast of Shippea Hill. For strategical reasons and all practical purposes, the camp was thussituated between two major rivers, providing the Achaeans not only with a naturaldefense but also with drinking water. The southern border of the Achaean camp consistedof a canal (taphros) and an earthen wall (teichos) reïnforced with stones and wooden beamsand completed with wooden towers.

This defense was built only by the end of the war at the proposal of Nestor when theTrojans threatened to attack the camp. The Achaeans started the work after the cremationof a number of their dead comrades who were buried in a collective barrow:

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Before the following dawn [...] a detachment of Achaean troops gathered by the pyre and set towork. Over the pyre, they made a single barrow with such material as the plain provided. And fromthere they built a wall with high ramparts to protect the ships and themselves, fitting it with stronggates, so that chariots could drive through.Outside and parallel with the wall, they dug a deeptrench and in this broad and ample ditch they planted a row of stakes. (VII,433-441)

The barrow in question is not very helpful in determining the exact location of the wall, asthere are many traces of Bronze Age cremations in the region due to the war and theplague. Besides, many barrows in the plains of Cambridgeshire have disappeared overtime due to erosion and plowing, some being only visible from the air as cropmarks.Another approach is therefore needed to find the tracé of the canal and the campwall. Itseems a logical thing to do for the Achaeans to link up the Cam in the west with the Larkin the east. The canalisation of the Lark, whose construction date is unknown butsupposed to be medieval18, might well be a reconstruction of whatever remained of theBronze Age ditch. The canal runs straight from Isleham northwest to Prickwillow, fromwhere it follows the old course of the Cam in the direction of Littleport. Traces of an older,extinct waterway have been found which followed a curved line over half of the canal'slength19 and which might well have been part of the original Achaean ditch (see Map 3).The campwall had seven entrances as the guard was mounted by ‘seven commanders withhundred sentries each who took their post between the ditch and the wall' (IX,85). Startingfrom the region of Ilus' barrow, Hector attacked the wall with five divisions (XII,87), whichmeans that five of the seven gates were situated east of the Cam (if there were more, theTrojans risked an attack in the flank). The other two gates were therefore situated west ofthe Cam, where Priam passed one of them on the way to Achilles' quarters situated in themost western part of the camp. It appears that the wall was not extended along thewestern border of the camp as Patroclus ‘hemmed the Trojans in between the ships, theriver and the wall' (XVI,397, see P on Map 3). The river on the western border must havebeen sufficient protection, and this may also have been the case with the river on theeastern border, probably because they were relatively wide near the sea.

But how could the entire campwall be swept away soon after its construction? Thesuperstitious people of the time believed that the gods were angry because they had notreceived sacrifices during its construction. In reality, since the Achaeans were unfamiliarwith the country, they had underestimated the huge volume of rainwater that could bechanneled by the local rivers which drain a vast area of central England. That is why inour time an elaborate network of canals prevents flooding of the Fenlands. In 1830 theCam has also been partly canalized (see dotted line C on Map 3). But Achilles nearlydrowned when the ‘heaven-fed Xanthus' (Cam) had flooded the plain close to the camp(XXI,233-272). It is therefore quite possible that nine days of incessant rain generated somuch water in the rivers which ran from two sides into the canal in front of the camp, thatthe floods could sweep away the earthen wall over the entire length of about fourteenkilometers (eight miles).

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Inside and Around the Achaean Camp

The chariot-races which were part of Patroclus' funeral games were held inside the camp20.The charioteers started on the beach and turned at such a distance inland that they werenearly out of sight (XXIII,462-482). This implies that the campwall was situated severalkilometers from the beach. The ‘wide camp of the Achaeans' as the poet often desribes it(e.g.: I,384 or XXIV,199), must therefore have covered an area of some forty squarekilometers. Much space was required for the ships, the barracks of the commanders(which had several rooms, a portico and a courtyard), the huts of the 100,000 troops andtheir female slaves and prisoners, the shrines for the gods, the stables and pastures forhorses and cattle. There were of course ‘many paths across the camp' (X,66), the greaterpart of which is now called the Burnt Fen, a possible reminder of the Achaeans burningtheir barracks before their departure. Here, archaeologists have discovered a pit withunusual large quantities of household refuse. And in the middle of the Burnt Fen, we findthe ‘Temple Farm' about where once the Achaean altars must have been near Odysseus'barracks situated in the mid-section of the beach (XI,808).

Northwest of Littleport is the Mare Fen, a possible reminder of Achaean horses grazingnear the sea where ‘Boreas, the North Wind, enamoured of the mares, covered them afterlikening himself to a dark-maned stallion' (XX, 224). Close by is Butcher's Hill which maybe a reminder of the butchers who supplied the army. In the plains near the eastern,southern and western borders of the camp there are three Sedge Fens named either afterthe wild plant sedge, common to the Fenlands, or else after Old English sedge which, mostappropriately, meant ‘warrior'*. When Odysseus interrogates Dolon, a Trojan capturedduring the night, he is told that one part of the Trojan allies are ‘lying over by the sea',meaning east of the camp (see Sedge Fen SF1 on Map 3) - while others ‘were allotted groundin the direction of Thymbra' (X,427-431). Although the latter name - meaning ‘savory'- hasdisappeared, either the region south of the camp was meant (see SF2), or the region to thewest (SF3), as most of these allies came from distant lands situated west of the Troad (seePart IV for the origin of the Trojan allies).

The Invasion of the Troad

Homer gives a lively impression of the Achaean invasion of the Troad which is in manyrespects comparable to the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944. Even today, their militaryperformance is most impressive, as it is very difficult to invade a country from the sea, themain problems being the setting-up of defendable quarters and the provisioning fromoverseas. In the Bronze Age as in modern times, a very wide bay and a large beach wererequired for the disembarkation of the armies, which was found respectively in the Washand the Seine Bay. After the landing of the 1186 ships and the installation of the barracks,

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the Achaean regiments march on Troy in the plain of the Scamander. The tens ofthousands of bronze-clad warriors advancing in the fenlands must have been abreathtaking sight :

Even as a consuming fire maketh a boundless forest to blaze on the peaks of a mountain, and fromafar is the glare thereof to be seen, even so from their innumerable bronze, as they marched forth,went the dazzling gleam up through the sky unto the heavens. And as the many tribes of wingedfowl, wild geese or cranes or long-necked swans on the Asian mead by the streams of Caystrius flythis way and that, glorying in their strength of wing, and with loud cries settle ever onwards, andthe mead resoundeth ; even so their many tribes poured forth from ships and huts into the plain ofScamander, and the earth echoed wondrously beneath the tread of men and horses. So they tooktheir stand in the flowery mead of Scamander, numberless as the leaves and the flowers in theirseason. (II, 455-468)

The Asian mead - eponym of Asia, a daughter of Oceanus in classical mythology - near thestreams of Cayster, is the bird sanctuary near the North Sea now known as ‘The Broads'situated to the south of Caister-on-Sea (see Map 2, key 22). The comparison of the numberof warriors with the countless fowl in the region is not an exaggeration but consistent withBook II of the Iliad (see Part IV).

Archaeological Finds on the Battlefield

If tens of thousands of warriors equipped with bronze armour and weapons were fightingin the plain, one should expect to find at least some bronze objects left behind in theregion, despite the fact that bronze was at the time as highly valued as gold, and thereforecarried away as much and as soon as possible by the victors :

[Nestor shouting to his warriors] :…let no man now abide behind in eager desire for spoil, that hemay come to the ships bearing the greatest store ; nay, let us slay the men ; thereafter in peace shallye strip the armour from the corpses that lie dead over the plain. (VI, 68-71)

Although the survivors recuperated most of the bronze from the battlefield - much of theremaining metal presumably being found and re-used or sold by local inhabitants eversince - archaeologists have nevertheless discovered many more bronze objects dating fromthe late Bronze Age. The region is even nicknamed ‘the paradise of field archaeologists',and understandingly so, judging by a recent survey of English Heritage of archaeologicalfinds from the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age21. The enumeration of findsmade between 1844 and 1994 and their find-spots becomes really meaningful if we mapthem out. It then appears that the highest concentration of discoveries dating from the lateBronze Age is found in the region situated between the Devil's Dyke and the former

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coastline between Littleport and Shippea Hill. This region corresponds to the northern halfof the presumed battlefield of the Trojan War. It is precisely here that by far the greatestquantities of bronze objects found in England were discovered (the region south of theDevil's Dyke is not included in the survey). The most important finds are the following(see the corresponding numbers on Map 3):

1. Isleham: a hoard of more than 6500 pieces of bronze, in particular swords, spear-heads, arrows, axes, palstaves, knives, daggers, armour, decorative fitments (inparticular for horses) and many fragments of sheet bronze, all dating from the lateBronze Age (Britton,1960; see Plates). The greater part of these objects have beenentrusted to the Moyse's Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, while other items arewithin the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.The swords show holes where rivets or studs held the wooden hilt in place. Thestuds were usually made of bronze except for commanders like Achilles orMenelaüs who had ‘silver-studded swords' while the Commander-in ChiefAgamemnon had both a silver- and a gold-studded sword.

2. Stuntney : 80 pieces, including bronze axes, swords and palstaves (1939).

3. Soham: a couple of hoards of bronze objects are known from the area, including onewith swords and spearheads of the later Bronze Age as well as a gold torque (1938);an extensive ditch system was found, not visible on aerial photographs; and awooden trackway 800m in length between Fordey Farm (Barway) and LittleThetford (where King Priam is supposed to have crossed the river with hiswaggons) with associated sherds of later Bronze Age pottery (1935).

4. Wicken: some Bronze Age activity known; a number of barrows survive.

5. Freckenham (Isleham Plantation): a circular earthworks measuring 70 meteracross with a ‘tail'of another 50 meter; some later Bronze Age metalwork; traces ofvarious activities.

6. Snailwell and:

7. Chippenham : from here northwards along the eastern edge of the fenlands aremany find-spots from the Bronze Age, including traces of cremations and barrows,the largest one measuring 43 meter across.

8. From Mildenhall to:

9. West Row : over a hundred Bronze Age sites, most of which still have to beinvestigated; a large quantity of metalwork was found well spread over thelandscape.

10. Eriswell22: 40 scattered finds, including battle axes, palstaves and rapiers (longswords).

11. Lakenheath : various find-spots, most of which have not yet been investigated. It

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goes without saying that no bronze was found where the Achaean camp stood, asthe warriors took their booty home after the war, leaving only a lot of rubbishbehind. And much waste has indeed been discovered, for instance near:

12. Shippea Hill : many finds from the Stone Age to the late Bronze Age were made in1934 during excavations to a depth of 5 meter.

13. Burnt Fen : an ‘unusual find' consisting of a huge pit filled with potsherds and allsorts of household refuse. Finds of bronze were also reported in the region to thewest of the Cam:

14. Downham and:

15. Downham Fen : scattered finds of bronze armour.

16. Coveny and:

17. Mepal : several bronze axes, two shields, a few swords and a spear-head.

18. Wilburton : a hoard of 163 bronze objects including 115 spear-heads (1882) whileearlier three palstaves and a heavy gold torque were found here (1844).

Bronze razors (called ksuron by Homer, X,173) have also been found and it is well-knownthat the Celts shaved their cheeks. So did the Sea Peoples pictured on a low relief in thetemple of Medinet Habu in Egypt. They are shown with two-horned helmets and althoughthey look very European, they cannot have been Greek, as is always thought, as the Greeksdid not shave before the fifth century BC. On Mycenaean pottery men are usually shownwith beards and this is how the Greeks also pictured Homer's heroes, although this doesnot correspond to the descriptions in the Iliad nor to Celtic custom. As ImmanuelVelikovsky rightly pointed out, the soldiers of the Sea Peoples used to shave, a fact which‘casts serious doubt on the generally held opinion that the Sea Peoples were MycenaeanGreeks'23. A number of small barges (length 10 to 14 meters) for local transport were foundin Bronze Age deposits, for instance at Warboys west of Littleport. Elsewhere in Englandalso remains of seaworthy vessels dating from that period have been discovered, but notraces of the Achaean ships were found as they had left after the war except for thoseburned by the Trojans. There are obviously no Bronze Age finds in the region oncecovered by the sea north of the Little Ouse. Throughout the region countless bones ofhumans and horses have been found by farmers, archaeologists, construction workers,pipe-layers and metal-detectorists although ‘the region is not known to have been the siteof a major battle' as a puzzled Prof. McKenny Hughes noted in his report of 190424.Excavations also have turned up many oyster shells. It seems that oysters, which arecultivated on East Anglia's coast, were already much appreciated in the Bronze Age asHomer compares a wounded warrior falling head-on from his chariot with an oyster diver!

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The Burial Mound of Patroclus and Achilles

When Achilles' inseparable friend and comrade-in-arms Patroclus, who had been educatedas a brother in his parental home, had died in combat, a pyre of 100 feet square (30 30meters) was built near Achilles' barracks for the cremation of the corpse (XXIII, 138ff). Thecircular earthen wall around the pyre was therefore about 40 meters across, but Achilles,who wanted to share not only the golden urn, as Patroclus had requested, but also thebarrow with his friend, had ordered that it be enlarged after his own death (XXIII, 247).But the barrow on the beach must have been a temporary one as it seems unlikely that amonument destined for eternity would be built on the seashore or in the floodplain of therivers, where nature could destroy it in short order as it did the campwall. One maytherefore suspect that those who lived after Achilles (who, according to other sources, waskilled by Paris under the walls of Troy) decided to build a new burial mound on higherground, and that the Iliad mentions only the measurements of the permanent structure toimpress posterity. Now it so happens that the largest burial mound in the region,measuring 70 meters across, with a ‘tail' of another 50 meters, is situated at IslehamPlantation near Freckenham, not far from the Achaean camp (see Map 3, key 29). Thismonument might well be the last resting place of the two famous warriors despite the factthat, according to the Odyssey (24,81), Achilles' barrow was visible from the sea. This wasof course never the case with the earthworks near Freckenham, but it is generally agreedthat lines 1 to 204 of Book 24 of the Odyssey are a post-Homeric addition, and for thatreason placed in square brackets in some translations, such as the French version by Prof.Victor Bérard. These lines, which are not only contradictory but also of inferior poeticquality, apparently date from a much later period when the Greeks took the huge StoneAge tumulus on the coast of Asia Minor for Achilles' tomb. As also the critics Aristophanesand Aristarchus, who lived in the 2nd century BC, considered line 296 of Book 23 as the endof the authentic Odyssey, we may ignore the line that Achilles' burial mound was visiblefrom a passing ship.

Other Sites in the Troad (see Map 3, keys 13 – 28)

Not only rivers, dykes and barrows are important features of the Trojan landscape, but soare hills, regions and towns. To start with, Homer mentions three famous hills in theregion:

Zeus, who supported the Trojans, was believed to have watched the battles from a peak ofIda, the Gargarus, where he had a sanctuary and an altar for burnt-offerings (VIII,48;XIV,292). The most likely site is the high hill (147 meter) of the Ditton Woods south ofCambridge which is called Chrishall in our era (Cristeshala in 1068). In our era a churchwas built on top of the hill where once Zeus' altar may have been.

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The Callicolone or ‘Beauty Hill', from where the wargod Ares exhorted the warringparties, was situated on the Simoïs (XX,53). According to classical mythology it was thescene of the judgement of Paris whose golden apple, given to him by Eris, was at the rootof the hostilities. This hill was never identified anywhere, but colone (=‘hill') became Colne,the name of a little town next to a hill which is effectively situated on the Great Ouse.Later, during the Iron Age, the river flowed around the hill northward to the Wash, but atpresent the Great Ouse again flows eastward to join the Cam as it did in Homer's time.

Poseidon, who sided with the Achaeans, had risen from the sea and was believed to havewatched the events from the highest hill of wooded Samos of Thrace (Samos Threikies,XIII,12, usually translated as Samothrace with the Aegean island in mind). However,Samos of Thrace, which is not described as an island, should be sought west or north-westof the Wash where we earlier identified 'deep-soiled' Thrace. From here, Poseidon couldsee 'the whole of Ida, as well as Priam's city and the ships of the Achaeans' (nr.15 on Map2, hill not identified).

When the goddess Iris had a message for the seanymph Thetis who was residing on thebottom of the sea near the Achaean camp, she ‘leapt into the dark sea half-way betweenSamos and sandy Imbros' (XXIV,78). Samos and Imbros which are not described as islandsby Homer are the headlands on either side of the Wash. 'Samos of Thrace' was situated tothe west where 'deep-soiled' Thrace was identified earlier as part of Lincolnshire and westCambridgeshire, while Imbros, described as hilly, was all or part of Norfolk (in the AegeanSea the story does not make any sense as Samos and Imbros are separated by the bigislands Lesbos and Chios)25.

When two goddesses travel from Lemnos (on the Continent, see Map 17, key 23) to theTroad, they leave the sea near Lecton (XIV,284), which would be present Lexden, a smallsuburb of Colchester, a place inhabited since the Stone Age. More than a millenium afterHomer, Colchester was also the most important port of access to Britain for the Romans.

The isle of Tenedos (I, 38) was called Tanatus by the Romans and today the Isle of Thanet.Although it became part of the mainland of southeast England in the Middle Ages, theregion is still called the Isle of Thanet. Here many Achaeans returning home after the warmade sacrifices to the gods, as we learn in the Odyssey (3,159). Chryse (I, 38), described asa ‘deep harbour' (I,432), was situated on the Thames where the towns of Grays andCrayford as well as the river Cray remind us of the region where Odysseus returned thegirl Chryseïs to her father Chryses, who was priest of Apollo and high-priest of ‘holy'Cilla, now the region of Chilham (>Cilla's ham*) near Canterbury. In Roman times therestood a ‘Temple of the Brilliant Apollo' (Templum Candidi Apollinis) near the U-shapedmeander in the Thames in east London called ‘The Bow' on which Silvertown is situated26.

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But already in Homer's time the whole region of the lower Thames between London andthe sea was the domain of Apollo, ‘the god of the silver bow', judging by the prayer of thehigh-priest Chryses to the god, in which he mentions the four sites in the right orderdownstream along the Thames27:

‘Hear me, thou of the Silver Bow, who dost stand over Chryse and holy Cilla, and dost rulemightily over Tenedos'. (I, 451)

Apollo is also surnamed ‘Smintheus' or Sminthean' meaning ‘mouse-god' as it wasbelieved that he could give or deliver from the plague which apparently was supposed tobe transmitted by mice instead of rats. We read in the Odyssey that his half-sister, thegoddess Athene, planned to sail up the Thames disguised as a merchant :

[Athene, speaking to Telemachus] : I declare that I am Mentes, the son of wise Anchialus, and I amlord over the oar-loving Taphians. And now I have put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew,while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way to Temese for bronze ;and I bear with me shining iron'. (1,180-184)

According to Prof. Finley, neither Taphos nor Temese are known as place-names or miningregions and impossible to identify28. But Taphos and the Taphians will be identified inChapter 18, while Temese not only designated the river Thames but also a settlement on itsbanks where the alternative name of Pallas Athene, Pallas Okke, is preserved by the townof Ockendon, east of London. (see Explanatory Notes 9: Geographical Names in Homerand 10 : Temese / the Thames).

Of the twelve places on the coast of the Troad and the eleven cities inland which weredestroyed by Achilles, only six are mentioned in the Iliad. Apart from the islands (andcities) of Tenedos and Lesbos (see Chapter 4), there was ‘Trojan' or ‘Cilician' Thebes(VI,396), sometimes simply referred to as ‘the town of Eëtion' (IX,189) after the father ofHector's wife Andromache. It was probably Theberton near the North Sea coast in Suffolk.

Lyrnessus, the town of Achilles' girlfriend Briseïs, might be King's Lynn. The town wasdestroyed at about the same time (XX, 84-96) as the hilltown of Pedasus on the Satnioïs(VI,35) which should therefore be sought on the banks of the Little Ouse about whereeither the Roman Peddarsway or the prehistoric Icknield way crossed the river. Bothtowns were inhabited by the Leleges, people from present Norfolk (see Map 19, key 45 inPart IV).

[ 'Where Troy Once Stood' by I.Wilkens, revised edition; Part II, Chapter 1; page 20 of 22 ]

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To conclude, Scuros (IX,668) is possibly the Boston suburb of Skirbeck in Lincolnshire, butthere was another Scuros, Achilles' homestead29 which was situated on the continent at twoto three days sail from the Achaean camp (IX,363) in ‘deep-soiled' Phthia (which was partof the Low Countries, see Map 12, key 11 in Part IV).

One may wonder how the Achaeans were supplied with food. The answer is that theylived off the land as so many other armies did after them. According to Dictys severaltowns in the Troad hoped to escape destruction by offering enough wheat to feed theAchaean army for a whole year.

There remains an unexplained name (Thymbre) near the city of Troy which is mentionedin the story where during the night the Trojans occupied the battlefield where 'some oftheir allies were lying towards the sea, others towards Thymbre' (X, 426-431). Thus far, itwas always believed that a town or river was meant, but according to Dictys it was a holywood of Apollo Thymbraean. More place-names in the Troad will be found in Part IV: ‘TheCatalogue of Ships' which lists the Achaean and Trojan regiments and attempts to identifythe origin of the Sea Peoples in countries situated along the west coast of continentalEurope and in Britain respectively.

Key to Map 2: Troy in England

Rivers in the Troad

1 Rhesus – Rhee2 Heptaporus – Hiz and Ivel3 Caresus – Car dike4a Rhodius – Roding4b - Kenneth5 Granicus – Granta6a Aesepus – Ise6b - Lark7 Scamander – Cam8 Simoïs – Great ouse9 Satnioïs – Little Ouse10 Cayster – Yare11 Axius – Exe12 Temese – Thames

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Hills

13 Gargarus, a peak of the Ida woods – height of the Ditton Woods, Chrishall14 Callicolone (on the Simoïs) - hill near Colne on the Great Ouse15Highest hill of Samos of Thrace - highest hill west of the Wash (not identified)

Other Names

16 Imbros - region east of the bay17 Samos - region west of the bay18 Scuros – Skirbeck (?)19 Thrace – Lincolnshire20 Lyrnessus – King's Lynn (?)21 Pedasus – site on the Little Ouse 22 Asian Meadow – The Broads23 Thebes in Troad – Theberton24 Lecton – Lexden 25 The Bow – meander in the Thames26 Chryse – region of the Cray river, Crayford and Grays27 Cilla – region of Chilham 28 Tenedos – Isle of Thanet

Archaeological find-spots:

The numbers 1 to 18 are described in this chapter.

Other features:

19. Copley Hill, hillfort with tumulus (Hector's barrow?) 20. Wandlebury Ring (hillfort), the former Pergamus (IV,508 and VI,512) 21. Approximate site of the Scaean gates 22. The hillock between Troy and the sources: Missleton Hill 23. The springs of Springfield near Cherry Hinton, with the ‘War Ditches' and the

limestone quarry 24. The Cherry Hinton and Coldham Brooks 25. Fen Ditton or High Ditch 26. The spot near the confluence of the Scamander and the Simoïs where Here stays her

horses (V,775). 27. The barrow of Ilus (e.g. XI, 166) at Barway.

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28. The ford in the river Xanthus/Scamander/Cam (XXIV,692; wooden trackway found) 29. The burial mound of Achilles and Patroclus (?) at Freckenham 30. The barrow of Myrina (II, 814) 31. Marshland (XX, 221) 32. Callicolone (‘Beauty Hill' ; XX, 53 and 151) : Colne

BF Burnt FenMF Mare FenBH Butcher's HillSF Sedge Fens (1, 2 and 3)KP The last leg of Priam's journey to Achilles, accompanied by a safe-conduct (XXIV,349and further)C Canalisation of the Cam in the 19th century

G Gates in the wall were seven in all, five of which gave access to the main battlefield,while Priam passed through the most western gate on the other side of the Scamander

H Hector attacks five gates to the Achaean camp with five companies (XII,87), starting offfrom the region of Ilus' barrow (comp.VIII,489ff with X,415). Once inside the camp herushes to the ship of Telamonian Ajax (comp XV,416 and 471) which was beached at theeastern extremity of the camp (as Achilles' ship was at the opposite, western, end;VIII,224). Although Hector, being the commander, must have entered the camp throughthe central gate, he indeed soon finds himself battling near Ajax' ship on the easternextremity of the beach as the map clearly shows. Hector does not succeed in setting fire toAjax' ship but he burns the ship of Protesilaus beached next to it (XV,704ff)

P Patroclus hems the Trojans in ‘between the ships, the river and the high wall' (XVI,396)

A Achilles' counterattack splits ‘the Trojan forces in two, driving one part citywards acrossthe plain and the other part into the river' (XXI,1-8) According to translations ‘the battlesurged back and forth over the plain between the Simoïs and the Scamander' (VI,3), butaccording to the scholia of the 2nd century BC the original line read: ‘the battle surged backand forth over the plain between the Scamander and the bay', which turns out to be the rightversion

Not yet identified with certainty are:

a. The shared burial mound of Patroclus (XXIII, 124) and Achilles. A likely site is thegreat barrow of Isleham Plantation near Freckenham (key 29) for reasons set out inthis chapter.

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b. The barrow of Hector, situated outside the walls of Troy (XXIV,783-803) .As theTrojans feared an attack during the 11-day period of mourning, they must havechosen a site close to the city and at the shortest possible distance from the Idawhere they fetched the wood for the pyre. Among several Bronze Age barrows nearthe Gog-Magog Hills a likely site would therefore be the tumulus on Copley Hill(key 19).

c. The tomb of Aesyetes (an unknown Trojan) situated on a hillock which served as aTrojan observation post near the coast (II, 793).

For more geographic detail readers are advised to consult the Ordnance Survey maps,scale 1:25000.

Notes

* Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985.1 Herodotus, The Histories, Book I,57, Penguin Classics.2 Pelasgoi (<Pelagskoi), derived from pelagos = sea (litt.‘flat surface, of land and sea').3 Théophile Cailleux, Pays Atlantiques décrits par Homère, Paris 1879.4 E. Zangger, The Flood from Heaven, Deciphering the Atlantis Legend, Sidgewick & Jackson, London, 1992, pages213-214.5 H.J.Mason, The Black Fens, Providence Press, Ely, 1984. See the map "Fenland Waterways, Past and Present",by G.Fowler (1946, revised 1970) made for the Royal Geographical Society.6 As suggested by P.M. Hughes of Harpenden in private correspondence, September, 1997.7 Tim Malim et al, New Evidence on the Cambridgeshire Dykes and Worsted Street Roman Road, Offprint fromProceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Vol. LXXXV (1996), 1997. p.29.8 Alison Taylor, Archaeology of Cambridgeshire,Vol. 2, Cambridgeshire County Council, 1998, p.29.9 Teichos is cognate with German ‘Deich' or English ‘dyke' and purgos with ‘burg' in the Germanic languages,‘bourg' in French.10 Only after Homer, and starting with Herodotus, gephura also meant ‘bridge'.11 Ezekiël, 38 and 39, in particular 39:1-20.12 Ovid, Heroïdes I,1,53.13 Pattison, P., and Oswald, A ; Wandlebury Hillfort Cambridgeshire, Archaeological Field Survey Report, RoyalCommission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1995.14 Alison Taylor, op.cit., p.81.15 Wendy Clark, Once Around Wandlebury, Cambridge Preservation Society, 1985.16 See article by M. Hinman and T. Malim in Past, the Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, nr 31,April, 1999.17 Pierre Grimal, Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Blackwell Reference, 1986.

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18 David Hall and John Coles, Fenland Survey, English Heritage Archaeological Report nr 1, 1994, p.137.19 H.J.Mason, op.cit., see map.20 Other games included: boxing, wrestling, a foot-race, a duel with the spear, discus-throwing, archery andjavelin-throwing. Among the prizes were women, talents of gold, bronze cauldrons, horses, mules, and axes.21 David Hall and John Coles, op.cit.,p.81-88.22 Eriswell is probably not an eponym of Eris, the goddess of strife, but rather of Zeus' consort Here (whosupported the Achaeans) as the oldest spelling of the name (in the Domesday Book of 1086) is ‘Hereswella',meaning ‘spring of Here'.23 Immanuel Velikovsky, Peoples of the Sea, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1977.24 H.C. Coppock, Over the Hills to Cherry Hinton, Plumridge, Linton, Cambridge, 1984.25 In Greece, also these lines of Homer do not make sense at all due to the haphazard transposition of place-names, as between Samos near the southwestern coast of Turkey, and Imbros, near the northwestern coast, adistance of some 200 kilometers, there are the two big islands of Lesbos and Chios. One would also expectPoseidon to watch the battles from Imbros, the island nearest to Hissarlik, rather than Samothrace. Inaddition to the regions of Samos and Imbros in the Troad (XIII,33 and XXIV,78) there were also towns withthose names situated ‘overseas' (XIV,281 and XXIV, 753; not identified).26 Michael Harrison, The London that was Rome, The Imperial City Recreated by the New Archaeology, GeorgeAllen & Unwin, London, 1971.27 P.M. Hughes, The New Atlantean, New Solutions to Old Problems, Nr.18, Winter 1991-92.28 M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, Pelican Books, 1979, p. 68.29 In Greece, Phthia is a region in the northern half of the country, while Scuros is an island in the Aegean.(This is yet another example of the random transposition of place-names from western Europe to Greece).

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http://www.amazon.com/Baltic-Origins-Homers-Epic-Tales/dp/1594770522/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430657820&sr=1-1&keywords=felice+vinci

The Trojan Kings of England

Lecture by Iman J. Wilkens to the 'Herodoteans',

Classical Society of the University of Cambridge, UK

26th May 1992

Added note: The lecture text is provided here as a backup alternative to emeritus Professor P. H. Damste's website in the event there is difficulty accessing his website through the internet. In the 2009 expanded and revised edition of the book Where Troy Once Stood the lecture text below has been slightly abridged and includes minor changes. click here for more about the book

[Appendix 1 to 'Where Troy Once Stood by I. Wilkens, 2nd revised edition 1999, page 1 of 9]

Since classical antiquity, readers of Homer have been puzzled by theinconsistencies of the Greek geography as described in both the Iliad and theOdyssey. Already Strabo and Eratosthenes had abandoned their efforts to makesense of Homer's geography in the Mediterranean. To mention only a fewexamples of the absurdities : when Odysseus had arrived in his native countryIthaca, which is supposed to be Thiaki near Greece's west coast, he at first madebelieve Athene that he had come as a passenger aboard a ship travelling fromCrete to Sidon, present Saïda in Lebanon. But it is obvious to anyone that Thiakiis not on the way from Crete to Lebanon, but quite in the opposite direction.

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As to Ithaca itself, it is described as the westernmost of a group of islands whileit is also situated close to the mainland, with the tiny island of Asteris close by.As none of these descriptions and none of the other details mentioned by thepoet correspond to the present island of Thiaki, or to any of the other islands inthe region, the problem of identifying Homer's Ithaca has never been solved,despite the efforts of countless scholars. Most surprising is also the story whereAgamemnon recounts that it took him a full month to sail from his kingdomArgos, taken to be in the northeastern Peloponnese, to Ithaca, when we knowthat in Greece the trip takes less than 24 hours. One may also wonder why theAchaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy in Turkey as it would havebeen much cheaper, quicker and far more convenient to approach northwestTurkey overland via Thessaly.

What is more, they were clearly afraid to cross the sea, despite the fact thatsailing in the Aegean is rather a question of 'island hopping' as one is seldom outof sight of the next island. But Iphigenia had to be offered to secure a fair windand Menelaus even invoked the gods to show him the best course to sail fromLesbos to Euboea. But when he hears that his brother Agamemnon wasassassinated by his wife, he apparently sees no particular difficulty in makingthe enormous detour to Egypt to build a burial mound for his dead brother inthis country which, in fact, was ruled by the Pharaohs and certainly not byAgamemnon or any other Greek king.

If the Achaeans were afraid to cross the Aegean Sea, one also wonders whyParis, after the abduction of Helen, on his way from Greece to Turkey, wouldhave made the enormous detour via Sidon in Lebanon to buy some embroideredcloth for her.

Another story that defies explanation is about a merchant sailing from Taphoswith a cargo of iron to Temese, as it is impossible to identify these names withcoastal cities or with any mining region in the Mediterranean, as manycommentators have noticed. We are also informed about a place with a veryhealthy climate called the island of Syria, situated about six days sailing north ofOrtygia, which could not be identified either, apart from the fact that such anorth-south distance is too great for the Mediterranean. One also wonders, forinstance, how Menelaus' ship could drift from Cape Malea southwards to Cretein a storm blowing from the south!

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The list of inconsistencies in Homer's geography is very long indeed and this isalso true for the descriptions of the city of Troy and the Trojan plain. The ruins atHissarlik in northwest Turkey, which Heinrich Schliemann took for those ofHomer's Troy, despite the doubts expressed by the scientific community eversince, can hardly be those of the great capital 'with the wide streets' of Priam'skingdom, which, according to Homer, had a garrison of 50,000 warriors. The ruins of Hissarlik are those of a very small village, about the size of thePlace de la Concorde in Paris, but the layers VIIa and b, which correspond to thetime of the Trojan War, are particularly poor hamlets. What is more, the so-called 'Treasure of Priam' was found in a layer that is about a millenium too old.The Trojan plain in Turkey is also far too small to contain all the riversmentioned by Homer, or all the cities destroyed by Achilles. In fact this plain,which was even considerably smaller 3200 years ago, does not provide enoughspace for the installation of an invading army of about 100,000 men and stillleave enough room for the long pursuits with the horse-drawn chariots. SinceHomer speaks of the 'horse-taming Trojans' and of 'Troy rich in horses' onewould expect archaeologists to have found many skeletons of horses, which isnot the case.

Although the Trojan War was of great importance in Antiquity, neither Troy northe war are mentioned in the thousands of claytablets with diplomaticcorrespondence of the Hittites living in Turkey at the time, although thesetablets do mention for instance, the battle of Kadesh against the Pharaoh. Thenames of the famous commanders of the Trojan War are not mentioned either,nor those of the famous city of Athens nor the 'opulent' city of Mycenae, thecapital of Agamemnon's kingdom, which in fact has never been more than asmall village according to Thucydides. What is more troubling is that Mycenaehad ceased to exist by the time the Trojan War was about to start. We must alsoask ourselves the question whether it would take a great army ten years ofefforts to conquer a hamlet !

For all these reasons and many others, the late Sir Moses Finley, Professor ofAncient History at University of Cambridge, concluded that 'we areconfronted with this paradox that the more we know, the worse off we are'and he therefore suggested that 'Homer's Trojan War must be evicted from thehistory of the Greek Bronze Age'. As it seems difficult to disagree with hisconclusion, we are, in my view, left with only two options : either the great

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Trojan War never took place in northwest Turkey and consequently, the Iliad isthe fruit of pure imagination, or else, the war did take place, but in anothercountry. The first option must be discarded because it is very unlikely that amyth or any other work of pure imagination would go to such length to mentionhundreds of geographical names, give precise descriptions of towns and ports,and indicate distances and even travel directions. In addition, the Iliad and theOdyssey describe many people in great detail, from their physical appearance totheir character and often even their status, family ties and personal history. Inour days we have of course the example of Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' but lifein the Bronze Age was certainly too harsh for such a luxury ! Metric verse wasused to pass on useful knowledge from one generation of illiterates to another,and if we agree that it is most unlikely that a myth would provide such a wealthof detail, we are left with the alternative option, namely that the war took placein another part of Europe.

The next question then arises, of course, where that could have been. At firstsight, the problem is not a simple one, but Homer gives an initial indicationthrough the description of the late Bronze Age culture of his time, which has solittle in common with Mycenaean culture that a disappointed John Chadwick,who assisted Michael Ventris in deciphering the Linear B script, wrote an articleentitled 'Homer, the Liar', thus adding insult to injury for the poet who was notonly considered 'utterly ignorant of Greek geography' by Professor Murray, butalso incapable of correctly describing the culture of his society. As it seemsunlikely that a poet would be ignorant in both fields simultaneously, we have astrong argument to search elsewhere for the Trojan War. The most importantclue given by Homer is the cremation of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, whoseashes were collected in golden urns. By contrast, in Bronze Age Mycenae,important people were buried with a golden mask, many of which have beenfound by Schliemann, such as the golden mask he attributed to Agamemnon,but which has turned out to be a century too old to have belonged to this king.But cremation was a typical Celtic custom that was not shared by other peoplesin Europe at the time. Another interesting clue given by Homer is the frequentindication of oceanic tides, as tides are insignificant in the Mediterranean.Already Strabo wrote that 'Homer was not unfamiliar with tides and that forthis reason several of the places described by the poet should be sought in theAtlantic Ocean'. These combined indications given by Homer therefore suggestthat his epics related to Celts living on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.However, this suggestion raises a number of serious problems and questions

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which must be dealt with before arriving at any firm conclusions. The firstquestion is : were there already Celts living in Western Europe in the late BronzeAge, around 1200BC ? Although urnfields dating from this period have beenfound in England and on the Continent, we know the Celts only througharchaeological finds dating from the Iron Age, starting around 800BC but wehave no trace of their existence in the second millenium BC. Fortunately, Homerprovides another indication to help us out by mentioning in passing the 'veryfamous ' Galatea. But precisely because she was so famous in his time, the poetobviously did not need to elaborate, leaving modern readers in the dark aboutthe reason of her fame. But we learn from other ancient Greek sources that inclassical mythology Galatea was one of fifty-odd Nereïds and the legendarymother of the Celts, the Gauls and the Illyrians through her three sons, Celtus,Galas and Illyrius.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CELTIC PEOPLES

Gaia - Pontus|

Nereus

| _____ __________ ______|________________ _____ | | |Amphitrite Galatea Thetis

| | |Triton | (Achilles)

| _____ ______|___________ | | |Galas Celtus Illyrius

GAULS CELTS ILLYRIANS

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It is interesting to note that Achilles was also a relative of Galatea through hismythological mother Thetis, another Nereïd. He was of course not of the samegeneration as Celtus which means that Thetis was substituted for his biologicalmother merely as a mark of honour. In the Bronze Age, there were no civilian ormilitary honours and the only way to immortalize kings and heroes was tosubstitute names from the Pantheon for one or both of their biological parents.As to the Illyrians, they are mentioned by Thucydides among the 'barbarians'living in western Greece in his time. Much later they would become soinfluential that, during the Roman Empire, Greece and part of southernYougoslavia were known as the 'Prefecture of Illyricum'.

The relationship between Galatea, Celtus and Achilles is an irrefutable pieceof evidence that Homer's epics are of Celtic origin.

In this context, it is interesting to note that several specialists of the Celtsactually compared the Celtic culture in Western Europe with Homeric culture,as both the vernacular Celtic epics and Homeric epics are heroic, both recount awarrior aristocracy, both describe warriors fighting from two-wheeled, horse-drawn chariots and both show the highest esteem for individual courage. Butfew suspected that Homer himself originated from the Atlantic seaboard, andthose who did found it impossible to prove, because of the second majorproblem we have to solve : if one assumes that the Trojan War was a conflictbetween Celts fought in England, how does one explain that Egypt, Lesbos,Crete Cyprus and Syria are only a few days sailing from Troy ?

This problem remained the major stumbling block until I realized that inHomer's time these places had entirely different names : Lesbos was called Issia,Cyprus was Alasjia, Crete was Keftiu, Syria was Aram while Egypt was calledKemi or Misr (as today) and in Hebrew Mitsrayim, also unchanged until today.The conclusion was that the geographical names mentioned by Homerdesignated entirely different places, which were situated, as it turned out, inWestern Europe. It thus appears that we have always made a monumental errorin the chronology of place-names, and that there has been a transfer of place-names from Western Europe to the Mediterranean just as much later, colonistswould give familiar names to places in the America's and other regions in theworld. In the Bronze Age and the Iron Age the transfer of place-names was dueto the so-called Sea Peoples, who, judging by their names, were Celts and Gaulsfrom the Atlantic seaboard who sailed into the Mediterranean as early as the

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second millenium BC as recorded by the Egyptians. What is more, Herodotustells us that the city of Athens was founded by a non-Greek people, thePelasgians, meaning Sea Peoples. According to him, the Pelasgians changed thenames of many Greek towns and began speaking Greek when they hadintegrated with the local population.

THE SEA PEOPLES (Thirteenth century BC)

Egyptian names (Likely origin)

Dardany (Dardanians - Trojans from England, Dardanus being an ancestor ofKing Priam)

Denyen (Danaans - Danes, people from Scandinavia)

Tjekker (People from England, Teucer being an ancestor of King Priam)

Peleset (Pelasgians - "who dwell on the sea" people from the Low Countries)

Shikala (Sikule - "who live on ships", people from western France)

Note: The above table updated to 2005 version.

The detailed list of regiments in Book II of the Iliad enabled me to identifynearly all Homeric place-names in Western Europe of which only one-third wasever transposed to Greece and the Mediterranean. This work of identificationwas facilitated by the fact that place-names were grouped by region, mentioningalso many rivers which are reputed to have the oldest names in Europe. Thepicture that emerged was consistent and logical, as not only the geographicaldescriptions, but also the distances between places and the travel directions asgiven by Homer appeared to be entirely correct. As we all know, the Trojan Warwas started by Agamemnon, who was called 'the wide-ruling king', an epithetunjustified if he ruled over the small, northeastern corner of the Peloponnese,but most appropriate in Western Europe, where he ruled over a very vastterritory indeed, stretching from the Gironde river in southwest France to theRhine near Cologne in Germany. We can therefore consider Agamemnon as thefirst king of France in documented history, whose capital was Mycenae, since

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called Troyes, situated to the southeast of Paris on the Seine river. His kingdomwas called Argos, a name preserved by the Argonne region in northern France.Here, river names have changed very little over time. For instance, the Orneiariver in Homer is now the Orne. The same is true for many towns, such asCleonae, now Cléon and Gonoesse, now Gonesse, both situated near the Seine.But other names changed beyond recognition, such as Corinth, which becameCourances after the Middle Ages, when it was still called Corinthia. Similarly,Homer's Tyrins was still called Tirins in the Middle Ages, but has since changedits name to Thury-Harcourt, a little town in Normandy. And Agamemnon'scapital Mycenae was apparently renamed Troyes after his victory in the TrojanWar, much like in our era the names of victorious battles are given to avenues,squares and buildings in our cities, such as Trafalgar Square or Waterloo Station.

The Achaeans (Homer never speaks of Greeks) under the command ofAgamemnon, had waged war against a nation overseas, the Troad, which turnedout to correspond to present England, where Troy stood on the Gog Magog Hillsnear Cambridge. These hills, whose name refers to the most terrrible battle ofmankind in prehistory, mentioned in the Bible by the prophet Ezechiel, areabout 100 meters above sealevel, where they form a plateau large enough for acity with wide streets and a garrison of 50.000 warriors. In the adjacent plain, allrivers mentioned by Homer can be identified between the Ditton Woods and theWash, which was an ideal bay to receive the huge fleet of 1186 ships. It was alsopossible to identify many towns destroyed by Achilles in the plain as well as twogiant war-dykes and remains of prehistoric hill-forts. The Achaean army wasinstalled on the south coast of the Wash which was some 40 kilometers further tothe south than at present, close to Littleport and Shippea Hill. There remains thecrucial question as to why 29 regiments of continental Celts would wage a waragainst other Celts in England, given that they had much in common, had thesame language and practised the same religion. The reason for the war musthave been to secure free access to Cornish tin, just like more recently 29 alliesunited for the Gulf War to protect their free access to the sources of crude oil inthe Middle-East. In the Bronze Age, tin was a highly valued commodity whichwas as important for the economy as crude oil today. Tin is required to producebronze which is an alloy consisting of about 90 percent copper and 10 percenttin. Whereas copper is found in many places in Europe, in the second milleniumBC tin was found virtually exclusively in two regions : Cornwall and Brittany.But we know from archaeological research that the tin mines in western France

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were already worked-out by 1200BC, which is the reason why arsenic had to beused to harden copper, with dire consequences for people's health as attested byskeletons dating from the period. As this coïncides with the time of the TrojanWar, we may assume that access to tin was the real cause of the conflict.Commerce was no alternative, as the Continentals had nothing of great value tooffer in exchange, the British Isles being also rich in gold, silver and copper.Without tin, the Continent would virtually have returned to Stone Age livingconditions, whence the decision of king Agamemnon, whom Homer called'leader of men' to take the great responsibility of launching the greatest war theworld had ever seen.

The 28 allies of Agamemnon came from regions as far apart as southern Spainand southern Scandinavia. Among those from Spain were Odysseus - whose realname was Nanus according to the 11th century Byzantine scholar Tzetzes -whose island kingdom was in the present province of Cadiz where all theislands are now part of the mainland due to the silting up of the coastal areas bythe Guadalquivir and Guadalete rivers. Of all the allies, only Odysseus wasreticent to participte in the war which is understandable for the king of thestrategically best situated port in Europe, Cadiz, as he expected to always beable to acquire some tin from seafarers stopping over in the harbour of Ithaca.

Among Odysseus' neighbours were Nestor, king of Pylos - now called Pilas -who was nicknamed 'the Horseman of Gerenia' after the present town of Gerenain the same region. Menelaus, king of Sparta, lived in a town at the foot of theEsparteros mountain, this town being renamed Moron by the Moors. Furthersouth we find Homer's Sidon, presently Medina Sidonia, which is Arab for'town of Sidon'. To the north, another famous ally of Agamemnon was Achilles,prince of 'deep-soiled Phthia' in the Low Countries where is the fertile delta ofthe Rhine, Meuse and Schelde rivers. On ancient maps, the name of the Scheldeis spelled as 'Scelt', a name cognate with 'Celts' according to some researchers.They may well be right, as we find also a village called 'Galatea' on ancient mapsof the region, after the mythological mother of the Celts, whose name means'Milkwhite'.

In Homer's time, Phthia appears to have been the most important religiouscentre of the Celts from both sides of the North sea. For reasons of secrecy, theAchaean fleet had therefore to be assembled in a remote region of Denmark.Here the port of Aulis was situated in the present province of Aalborg in North

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Jutland, where, near the village of Nors, archaeologists have found a hecatombof 100 small ships of goldleaf dating from around 1200BC. The 'Treasure ofNors', which is now in the National Museum of Copenhagen, was almostcertainly a votive offering by the Achaean fleet before sailing to Troy in England,as both the time and the site near the large inland lakes in northern Jutlandsuggest. Among the 17 regiments of Trojan allies, two came from Finistère, thewesternmost tip of France and the others from various regions of England,Scotland and Wales. The allies from Finistère sailed up the Severn and Avon asfar as Pershore, which corresponds to Homer's Percote, from where, accordingto the poet, they travelled overland to Troy.

After the fall of Troy, Aeneas, his son Ascanius as well as Antenor, the counsellorof king Priam, managed to flee the country to settle in those parts of Europe thatwere not inhabited by allies of Agamemnon, in particular in Portugal, where wefind the Troia peninsula south of Lisbon, and in the Mediterranean countries, inparticular in Italy and northwestern Turkey, near the Dardanelles, which bearthe alternative name for the Trojans, the Dardanians (after Dardanus, founder ofTroy in England). It was here, around the Aegean Sea, that the memory of theTrojan War was kept alive, in Greece by the descendants of the Sea Peoples ofthe continental seaboard of western Europe, who cited the verses of Homer, andin Turkey by the descendants of the Trojans from England, who cited the storyas told by Dares. It is therefore not surprising that over time the peoples livingaround the Aegean Sea believed that the Trojan War had taken place in their partof the world.

According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his 'History of the Kings ofBritain' in the early Middle Ages, based on a much older document, a great-grandson of Aeneas, by the name of Brutus, sailed with an army to Englandwhere he founded London under the name New Troy (Caerdroia in Celtic) in1100 BC. Brutus became the first of the Trojan kings mentioned by the author. Brutus builthis capital on the Thames (Homer's Temese) rather than on the Gog Magog Hillsfor a better access to the North Sea, as the Wash was gradually silting up to formthe present Fenlands.

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THE TROJAN KINGS OF ENGLAND

Teucer|Dardanus(founder of Dardaniathe Troad, England)|Erichthonius|Tros

___________ ________|________

____________

| |Ilus(founder of Ilium - Troy)

Assaracus

| |Laomedon Capys| |Priam(king of Troy during the War)

Anchises

| |Hector Aeneas| |Astyanax Ascanius

|Silvius|Brutus(founder of New Troy - London)

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This genealogy is based on Homer from Dardanus down to Aeneas, while thelineage from Aeneas down to Brutus figures in the writings of Geoffrey ofMonmouth. The combined genealogy confirms that Homer's Troy wassituated in England as it is most unlikely that Brutus would have been allowedto found a new capital in this country and become its king if he had not hadstrong ancestral ties with the local population and a claim to the throne. Since Hector's infant son was reportedly killed during the sack of Troy, Brutusbeing of the lineage of Aeneas, was the rightful successor of the Trojan kings ofHomer's time. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, on their way from theMediterranean to England, Brutus and his army were joined by other Trojans,the descendants of Antenor under the command of Corineus soon after they hadpassed the 'Pillars of Hercules', in this context the Strait of Gibraltar. This wouldconfirm that some Trojans had indeed settled in Portugal, most likely in theregion of the Troia peninsula. The combined armies then sacked and burnedtowns along the French coast terrifying the inhabitants with the manifestintention to discourage these people to attack them in the rear during theliberation of England. It is hardly a coincidence that Brutus landed in Totnes inCornwall, not far distant from the tin mines, as he had no doubt to neutralize theAchaean garrison in Land's End before liberating the rest of the country. Also according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cornwall owes its name to Corineuswho was Brutus' second in command, while Brutus, once he had become king ofEngland named the country Britain after himself. Since the medieval author hasprovided us with a complete list of the kings of England from 1100BC to theMiddle Ages, it becomes also clear why Queen Elizabeth I was once greeted as'that sweet remain of Priam's state, that hope of springing Troy'. This wascertainly not - as is often believed - because of the Tudor fashion to admireHomer, as in that case they would not have identified with the losers of the war.No, it was clearly because at the time it was still known that Elizabeth I reallywas heiress to the throne of the Trojan kings. England's history can thereforenow be retraced to Dardanus, the founder of Dardania, the most ancient namefor the country, who lived in the fourteenth century BC.

On re-reading Homer, keeping in mind the particularities of the Bronze AgeCeltic culture and the poet's detailed toponomy of Western Europe, one mustadmit that his descriptions of both the society of his time and the geographyare astonishingly accurate.

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We must at last recognize that Homer was not an 'ignoramus' and 'liar' but aparticularly well-informed poet, whose works now turn out to contain anunsuspected wealth of information on the Bronze Age history of England andthe Continent, about which nothing was known until now. But we still have todeal with the often heard argument that Homer's epics concern Greek historybecause his works were written in ancient Greek. However, this is a very weakargument as it matters little whether an event is recounted in one language oranother. In fact Homer's texts were transmitted orally for some 400 years beforethey were translated and written down in Greece but it is still possible to retracetheir origin to the Sea Peoples living on the Atlantic seaboard. It is indeedunlikely that the original language was Greek.

Already Professor Flacelière noted that 'the metrics of the epics, the dactylichexameter, seems to be a borrowing, an imitation of a foreign model rather thanan invention of the Greeks themselves, since the lines contain an abnormallyhigh proportion of short syllables for their language, and thus require aparticular effort on the part of the poet'. It also appears that Homer's Greekcontains a large number of loan words from western European languages,relatively more often from Dutch rather than English, French or German. Thisphenomenon is not difficult to understand in view of the migration of the SeaPeoples into the Mediterranean during the second millenium BC, as confirmedby Egyptian records as well as Herodotus. Conversely we may assume that alarge number of Greek words were adopted in Western Europe long before theRenaissance. We may take this to be so as Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us thatBrutus and his men spoke 'Trojan' or 'Crooked Greek' which subsequentlybecame 'British'.

As to the date of the Trojan War, it is generally assumed that the event took placearound 1200BC although estimates vary widely. Eratosthenes placed thedestruction of Troy in 1184BC on genealogical grounds. This comes quite closeto the date of Odysseus' visit to the Low Countries just after the destruction ofTroy as recorded by the Frisian Oera Linda Book, better known in Englandunder the title 'The Other Atlantis'. Converted to the Christian calendar thiswould have been in 1188BC, implying that the war had started in 1198BC, a datealso compatible with the foundation of New Troy around 1100BC by Aeneas'great-grandson. We can deduct from Homer's works that he must havecomposed the Iliad about one generation after the war but not later than 1150BC.The best guess would be around 1160BC, followed by the Odyssey around 1155.

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These dates are also in line with his description of a late Bronze Age culture witha rudimentary iron technology. It seems very unlikely that the epics werecomposed at a later date for a number of reasons. For instance, there is nomention of a single person living after the Trojan War, not even the sons orgrandsons of Aeneas, nor is there any mention of the important city of Thebes inBoeotia, which according to Thucydides, was founded sixty years after the sackof Ilium. If, on the other hand the Iliad had been composed around 750BC as isoften believed, the Greeks, being convinced that the Trojan War was part of theirhistory, would almost certainly have added Thebes to the list of regiments. TheGreeks would also have felt obliged to give a more prominent role to theregiment of Athens which is hardly mentioned in the Iliad, as it was anunimportant place in Western Europe.

These considerations lead to other important conclusions : first, the lists ofregiments were not added at a later stage to the Iliad, as is often believed, butformed from the very beginning an integral part of the epic, which indeed oftenrepeats names of persons and cities mentioned in these lists and second, theepics were transmitted orally for about four centuries without significantchanges (although there are some interpolations), thanks to the use of metricverse.

As everyone knows, the fall of Troy was engineered by Odysseus who devisedthe trick of having the Trojans themselves introduce the famous wooden horsepacked with Achaean warriors into their city. Ever since, the Trojan Horse hasremained the symbol of people bringing defeat upon themselves and ofcatastrophe due to internal weakness. Although it cannot be established withcertainty whether the story of the Trojan Horse is based on an historical event, Ibelieve that the huge wooden horse was effectively built and that theunsuspecting Trojans indeed introduced it in their town. I also believe that therewere many Achaean warriors inside the structure. However, where my opiniondiffers with that of other historians is that I am sure that these warriors were notalive but dead. This may seem surprising at first sight, but the explanation islogical and can easily be deducted from Homer's text as follows:

In the Odyssey we read that on the eve of his return to Ithaca, Odysseus is theguest of honour at a banquet in the palace of king Alkinous. During the dinner,the bard Demodocus sings of the last days of the Trojan War and when he tells

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the story of the valiant Achaeans hidden in the wooden horse, who eventuallysacked the city, Odysseus starts to weep. This is noticed by Alkinous, whoorders the bard to stop singing. The important question is of course, why woulda heroic commander cry when he is reminded of his greatest victory ? Because ofthe victims he has made ? That is most improbable, as we have never heard ofgenerals weeping at dinner parties while they listen to words of admiration andpraise for their victories. And if someone would be so indiscreet as to remindthem of the terrible sufferings inflicted on the enemy, the reply would certainlybe that there is no pleasant way of killing enemies during a war.

We are therefore given to understand that Odysseus weeps because he is deeplyashamed of himself. He had obviously something terrible on his conscience, butwhat could that be ? A first clue is given in the very beginning of the Iliad whereHomer tells us that in the final year of the war the plague was raging in theAchaean camp. The warriors believed that the epidemic was caused by the blackmagic of a Trojan priest of Apollo, whose daughter, Chryseis, had beenkidnapped by the Achaeans and given to their leader Agamemnon. AlthoughAgamemnon was forced by the army to return the girl to her father, the problemof the epidemic was certainly not solved. As the number of his warriors quicklydwindled, Agamemnon offered towns, gold and women to persuade hisestranged ally Achilles - and his troops which had remained on the sidelines forsome time - to return to the battlefield. But Achilles refused, and the army wasunder increasing pressure to take Troy before most of its warriors had died ofthe plague. Since the Trojans were apparently not affected by the disease, thebalance of fighting power was increasingly tipped in their favour. At that crucialmoment in the war, the wily Odysseus must have pondered how to transmit theplague to the Trojans. After all, it was unfair of the gods to punish the Achaeanswith the disease, but not the Trojans. Since those who had died from the plaguewere cremated on pyres of wood as was Celtic custom, - which in thecircumstances was a wise custom indeed - he conceived the idea of constructinga pyre in the shape of a wooden horse on wheels to contain the bodies of thevictims of the disease. He let it be known in the enemy camp that the horse wasempty and built as an offering to Athene. When the troops were subsequentlyordered to burn their huts and take to the sea, simulating a sudden departurehome, Odysseus would have two possibilities of winning the war: the firstpossibility was that the Trojans would put fire to the wooden horse standing inthe plain during a religious ceremony dedicated to Athene, discovering too latethat there were dead bodies inside. In the opinion of the superstitious and god-

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fearing people of the time, this error was sure to bring the anger of the gods overthe Trojans. The Celts used to offer living humans and animals to their gods,while sacrificing dead bodies was considered as the worst of insults to theImmortals. If that were to happen, the gods would somehow make the Trojanspay dearly for it, thus enhancing the chances of the Achaeans.

The second possibility was that the Trojans would introduce the wooden horseinto their city for the religious ceremony. In that case they would inevitably becontaminated by the liquid dissection poison of the corpses inside the horse.Subsequently, the plague would spread all the more quickly as the populationwas weakened by the long - although often interrupted - war.

According to Homer, the Trojans did indeed introduce the horse into the city,but we can be sure that the warriors hidden inside were dead, as it is impossible,from a military point of view, to take a large city with a handful of soldiers.From history we know that it has occasionally succeeded but in very differentcircumstances. For instance, in 1590 a small group of Dutch warriors liberatedBreda from the Spanish occupiers after penetrating into the city hidden in a peatboat. The story is famous in the Netherlands, but a similar feat would have beenimpossible in Troy for two reasons : not only was Breda at the time a muchsmaller town than Troy, but, more importantly, its inhabitants sided with theinfiltrators. If these two preconditions are not fulfilled, the mission has nochance to succeed.

There is still another, very down-to-earth reason why the warriors hidden insidethe horse cannot have been alive : people sitting for one or more days locked-upwould need to relieve themselves, and this would not remain unnoticed !Therefore, our conclusion must be that Odysseus wept because he felt guilty of ahideous act we would call today a warcrime, and that Demodocus' version ofthe story of the Trojan Horse was a cover-up for a crime he, wily Odysseus, 'theman of the many resources', had devised.

Obviously, the Achaean commanders could not tell the home front that they hadwon the war with a criminal act. That is why also Homer, by mouth of Nestor,recounts that the most famous Achaeans, including Odysseus, were hidden inthe horse and sacked the city. The poet even reinforces the cover-up bysuggesting that it was Athene herself who had inspired Odysseus' trick.

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The contamination of an enemy camp with the plague was repeated in theMiddle Ages when the Mongols conquered an Italian fortified town on theCrimea in the Black Sea in a similar way. They hurled corpses of plague victimsinto the city with huge wooden levers. A few infected survivors escaped to Sicilyfrom where the plague epidemic started that would take the lives of one-third ofEurope's population.

As to Odysseus, he had acted against the strict code of honour of his time,namely that one was not allowed to kill people at a distance, the only exceptionbeing the archers (the noun for which was correctly rendered in ancient Greek asthe 'cowards'). The people of the Bronze Age would be incredulous to learn thatin our times mass-destruction can be achieved at a great distance by simplypushing a button. To them, real honour was bestowed only on the man whoexcelled in close combat.

Odysseus probably believed that he had merely 'assisted' the gods in spreadingthe plague in the Trojan camp, whereas in reality he had set a trap for theImmortals for which he would be severely punished. As we all know, he had towander for ten years over the seas suffering terrible woes. This was imposedupon him by Poseidon, not in his function as god of the ocean, but in his qualityas lord of the subconscious. The initiates among Homer's public would certainlyhave interpreted the Odyssey from a different perspective than the profane. Thepurification of the soul through harsh trials has always been a prerequisite forinitiation into the Mysteries, and for Odysseus the way to become an initiate or,as Homer calls it, 'god-like', was long and painful indeed.

Fortunately, he enjoyed the protection of Athene, the goddess of wisdom, whorescued him on several occasions. This also has a symbolic meaning, becausewisdom emanates from the subconscious, but not without a great deal ofsuffering. For the Ancients, the symbol of the eternal struggle between Poseidonand Athene, that is between the subconscious and wisdom, was the olive tree (insouthern Europe) or the willow (in northern Europe). That is why Homermentions the 'long-leafed' olive tree at the entrance of the harbour of Ithaca,present Cadiz, where Odysseus finally arrived after many years of ordealswhich were necessary for his redemption. This then, is what I believe to be thetrue story of the famous citadel of Troy, the 'holy city' which once stood justoutside Cambridge on the Gog Magog Hills.

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http://www.amazon.com/Baltic-Origins-Homers-Epic-Tales/dp/1594770522/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430657820&sr=1-1&keywords=felice+vinci

Where Troy Once Stood: The Mystery of Homer's Iliad &Odyssey Revealed

Laura Knight-Jadczyksott.net

©n/a The Trojan Horse, the symbol for being fooled by an outward show and appearance, letting down

one's guard, and bringing the enemy inside. Not far from what the world is experiencing today withthe rule of psychopaths: intraspecies predators who look like normal humans but are not.

We had just made an international move and were waiting in our new house for ourdelayed shipping container to arrive with our library. I was quite at loose ends withoutanything to read when this book arrived in the mail, sent by a friend who knew I waswithout books. I can tell you that, after reading the cover, if my library had been there, Iwould never have read it. "Stuff and nonsense!" I snorted! Who was this guy to suggestthat Troy was not close to Greece, that all the scholars were wrong? Well, it's really a goodthing I didn't have anything else to read! So many questions answered! Most people arenot aware that not one of forty characteristics of the City of Troy and the Trojan War plainfit the Mediterranean setting. What is astonishing is that the author of the Odyssey doesgive ALL the information needed to exactly place where Troy Once Stood!

For example:

* The Achaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy, they could havetravelled the short distance overland far quicker and cheaper if Troy really hadbeen in the Turkish setting.

* Odysseus claimed to have got home by travelling as a passenger on a shipgoing from Crete to Sidon (present day Saïda in Lebanon), but that is the

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opposite direction he needed to go in the Mediterranean setting.

* Agamemnon tells us it took him a full month to sail from his kingdom Argosto Ithaca, we know the trip takes less than 24 hours in the Mediterraneansetting.

* The mythical location for Troy in Turkey is far too small to accommodate theinvading army of about 100,000 men and the long pursuits in horse-drawnchariots.

* The extensively travelled Greek geographer Strabo who lived 2000 years ago(1200 years after the Trojan War) believed that some of the ports of call in theOdyssey should be found in the Atlantic because of the mention of tides that donot really exist in the Mediterranean.

Well, what really baked my noodle was the part about the rivers. Language and how itmorphs over time is a particular interest of mine and Wilkens showed that he knew hisstuff. The plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills is a place where more than 12rivers mentioned in the Iliad can still be recognised by name even today.

Iman Wilkens is not the only one who has suspected that there was something fishy aboutlocating Troy in Turkey. The modern day scholar Professor Sir Moses Finley, emeritus ofAncient History at the University of Cambridge (Fellow of British Academy) after years ofstudy and writing countless renowned books on Greek history, also opined that the weightof evidence made it clear that Troy and the Trojan War did not occur in Greece and Turkey,but some where else. Sir Moses said...

"There has come to be an abundance of empirical evidence that the world Homerwrote about did exist.

"The opinions of later Greeks and 19th Century scholars are irrelevant. We areconfronted with this paradox that the more we know, the worse off we are. Homer'sTrojan War must be evicted from the history of the Greek Bronze Age..."

In an even older work "Troje lag in Engeland: Odysseus landde in Zeeland" (translated: Troy layin the United Kingdom: Odysseus landed in the Netherlands) Ernst Gideon followed the workof the 18th and 19th century Belgium authors De Grave and Cailleux, who took pains toshow that Troy was located in England and that the Odyssey took place in the AtlanticOcean and the English Channel. Like Iman Wilkens, Ernst Gideon realized that the oceanHomer wrote about is wide, wild and dangerous, never smooth and sunny, the color wasgray and never blue, and such an ocean could not have been the Mediterranean sea. Inshort, the weight of the EVIDENCE makes it quite clear that Troy and the Trojan War didnot occur in Greece and Turkey (as we know it today), but somewhere else.

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It also raises many unanswered questions that Wilkens does not deal with. For example,we know that the land we now call "Egypt" was never called by that name until the time ofthe Greeks. It is very possible that a far more ancient Egypt, located elsewhere, was thelegendary home of the great mysteries and "spiritual knowledge" referred to in myths andlegend. And if that is the case, it turns philosophy on it's head (not to mention the theoriesof hundreds of so-called occultists and "alternative historians"!) The fad for all things"Egyptian" has been with us for a very long time. The fact is, the Egyptian civilization thatwe know from archaeology, epigraphy and documentary evidence, was static and limited.What's more, it caved in on itself, and never managed to produce any significant work ofbenefit for humanity, as Otto Neugebauer showed conclusively in his "The Exact Sciences inAntiquity".

The open-minded thinker ought to really consider the purported mysteries of the Egyptthat we know in terms of the fact that they were so ignorant that they devoted a hugeamount of energy to their "cult of the dead." The whole Egyptian shtick is focused aroundpreserving dead flesh for future or otherworldly reanimation. The very fact that there areso many of these dead bodies for Egyptologists to dig up is the clearest evidence that thebeliefs of the people we now consider to be the "Egyptians" were nonsense. The wholeissue of the excitement over Egyptian civilization is the belief that they had somemysterious powers because they built the pyramids and we can't. It has even beensuggested that it was not the people we now know as Egyptians who built the pyramids.Also, has it never occurred to anybody that the existence of the pyramids in conjunctionwith the worship of an elite group of human beings, while everybody else was wearingloincloths and sweating in the hot sun, might suggest a relationship between the two? Thefact is, the Egyptian civilization seems to have been the chief example of a vast chasmbetween the haves and the have-nots, and they managed to do it longer than anybody else.I'm not saying anything definitive here, I'm just saying that Wilken's book opens up awhole new way of thinking about things. How do we resolve this problem, the conflictbetween the ancient references to an "Egypt" that was home to great knowledge and theevidence of the spade? In a very real sense, finding that the original Egypt may very wellhave been in France and home to a Celtic or Druidic religion and culture restores toWestern Civilization its true heritage, displacing the unnatural Fascist, Asiatic monotheismbrought to us courtesy of Judaism.

Giovanni Garbini writes in History and Ideology in Ancient Israel:

"...[T]he interesting thing is that, apart from the many details concerning theexternal activities of the priesthood (which any Jew in Jerusalem could easilysee with his own eyes), the texts [of the Bible] do not contain any informationabout the structures, the organization and the other activities of the priestlyclass; it is like seeing only the front of a building.

"In these biblical writings we find not only a description of the religious

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practices, but often also their history, their meaning and their mythic origin, andsince the religion of Israel is the expression of its relationship with Yahweh, allIsrael's history becomes the history of this religion. In other words, these booksfix a precise moment in the history of Hebrew religion, when a deep reflectionon its nature was carried out. On the basis of this reflection, the entire past wasreinterpreted (not as it was, but rather as they wanted it to be) and the futureimagined, a glorious future with Jerusalem at the centre of the world." [...]

"Biblical Yahwism certainly reflects a monotheistic conception, but at the sametime it is something less and something more than monotheism. ...Yahwismseems to be something less than monotheism: God is certainly one, but he isessentially the God of just one people and he acts only with them. If we reflecton this aspect, which is the central nucleus of the Old Testament, we discoverthat here we have what the historians of religions call henotheism rather thanmonotheism. On the other hand, Yahwism is also, and perhaps above all, anextremely rational vision of the world and of the privileged position that thepeople of Israel occupies in the world. So it would be legitimate to ask whetherone could consider as a real religion, with all that this word implies... a doctrinelike that taught in the Old Testament in the first millennium BC, which deniesthe survival of the spirit."

He then asks how it is that a 'religion' which attributes importance to liturgies practicedonly in Jerusalem, which denies survival of the human spirit, could even have survivedand spread, especially after the destruction of said temple.

Good question.

Iman Wilkens discusses the Celts and their culture to some extent, but what he presents isunfortunately somewhat colored by the Asiatic Henotheism. That is one of the few flawsof the book. We are taught almost nothing about the Celts in school, though they seem tobe considered as the ancestors of most Europeans, thus also the majority of Americans.The question we need to be asking is: Why is it that the religion and culture of theMesopotamian region dominates our lives and our culture when it is, in effect, "foreign"and truly anti-spiritual? Celtic vernacular literature, including myths, stories and poems,in its written form, dates mainly from the Middle Ages. It is based on oral transmissionthat goes far beyond the Christian Era. It is very difficult to get a clear picture of the pre-Christian Celts from the transmitted texts, not only because of the typical mixture of mythand reality, and the lapse of time, but also because the Roman empire sought to stamp itout starting with Caesar and continuing with the Roman (Frankish, actually) church underthe influence of Christianity, daughter of Judaism. However, studying what is availableclosely, one gets the impression of a dynamic, somewhat undisciplined people. The Celtswere proud, imaginative, artistic, lovers of freedom and adventure, eloquence, poetry, and

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arts. You can always discern the Celtic influence by the great artistic talents of thesepeoples. The Celts were VERY suspicious of any kind of centralized "authority," and this is,in the end, what brought about their downfall. They could not stand against thehierarchical war machine of the Roman empire. In a sense, you could almost say that thisis also how Hitler nearly conquered Europe, most especially France. Gauls take theprinciples of liberty and equality VERY seriously - right down to the common man on thestreet who in no way considers himself inferior to the Prime Minister. One of the principalhistorians of the Roman era, Julius Caesar, tells us that the Celts were ruled by the Druids.The druids "held all knowledge." The Druids were charged with ALL intellectual activities,and were not restricted to religion, per se, which suggests to us that "religion" and"knowledge" were combined in a more or less scientific way, and were considered essentialto one another - symbiotic.

It is later writers who began to vilify the Celts by accusing them of the usual things thatpeople get accused of when someone wants to demonize them: human sacrifice,homosexuality, and so on. Most of that nonsense goes back to Posidonius, who has beenquoted as an "authority" by every other "authority" on the Celts since. Unfortunately, whenone checks Posidonius carefully, one finds that he really didn't have a clue and wasprobably making that stuff up to fulfill an agenda. He did, however, tell us somethingimportant about the Celts that supports the idea that a Celtic Egypt must have been thesource of the great mysteries of the ancient world: the Druid belief in reincarnation.Posidonius is quoted by Diodorus:

"Druids believe that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite numberof years they live a second life when the soul passes to another body."

Julius Caesar also wrote:

"The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but afterdeath, pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby castaside, they hold to be the greatest invective to valour."

The Celts believed in a world of the spirit, the immortality of the soul. That's a vastlydifferent philosophy than the one exposed in the texts of the Asiatic Jews which, asGarbini points out, "denies survival of the human spirit." In their art, the Celts expressedtheir ideas that spirit was an interconnection of all things in life. This is evident in the artof Celtic knotwork. The lack of written texts by the Celts has been the greatest problem forhistorians and students of the Celts. A lot of ideas are "supposed" or ancient sources withagendas have been relied on, and some of them even propose that there was a "taboo" bythe Celts on putting things into writing. Iman Wilkens idea of why the Celts didn't writethings down is one of the flaws of the book. He suggests that this was how the Druids"kept their power". (I already mentioned that he seems to be looking at things through theJudeo-Christian lens.) But, if we look at what Caesar said was the reason for the ban onwriting, we find that it was really quite logical. The Druids were concerned that theirpupils should not neglect the training of their memories, i.e. the Frontal Cortex, by relyingon written texts. It is worth noting that, in the nineteenth century, it was observed that the

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illiterate Yugoslav bards, who were able to recite interminable poems, actually lost theirability to memorize once they had learned to rely on reading and writing. So, it seems thatthe Druids were actually concerned more about the accurate transmission of their knowledgethan "holding power."

Although the Druids prohibited certain things from being written down, it's clear thatthey DID write. Celtic writings in Ogamic script have been found on many ancient stones.Caesar tells us that the Celts were using the Greek alphabet when the Romans arrived inGaul in the first century BC. The destruction of Celtic culture was so complete that weknow very little about their religion. We do know that they celebrated their "rites" inforests and by lakes without erecting any covered temples or statues of divinities. Tacitustells us:

"They do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls,or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places arewoods and groves and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presencewhich is seen only by the eyes of reverence."

Plato is another who had doubts about the Greek origins of Homer's work because notonly do the physical descriptions in his poems not correspond to the Greek world, but alsothe Homeric philosophy is very different from the mainstream Greek philosophy we knowabout today which is also heavily influenced by the foreign Asiatic element. According toHomer, the philosophy of the ancient world was that there was a third element that linkedopposing elements. Between the body and the soul, there is the spirit. Between life anddeath there is the transformation that is possible to the individual, between father andmother there is the child who takes the characteristics of both father and mother, andbetween good and evil there is the SPECIFIC SITUATION that determines which is whichand what ought to be done. In other words, there are three simultaneous determinants inany situation that make it impossible to say that any list of things is "good" or "evil"intrinsically, and that the true determinant is the situation. The symbol of this philosophyis the triskele, representing three waves joined together. The word "Triskele" evokes thename "Troy" and leads us to also consider the maze, called since ancient times"Troytowns."

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The simultaneous existence of the third element does not mean that the notion of "good"and "evil" did not exist or was not reflected in the Celtic law. Their point seemed to be thatthere is no way to make "black or white" laws that must be followed by rote. A peoplemust have wisdom to discern each situation and apply justice, not blindly, but with eyeswide open to the realities of the world and the specific situation. What was clear was thatit was understood that nothing could be "cut and dried" in terms of law, that each situationwas unique and the circumstances had to be carefully weighed. Aristotle considered Gaulto be the "teacher" of Greece and the Druids to be the "inventors of philosophy." TheGreeks also considered the Druids to be the world's greatest scholars, and whosemathematical knowledge was the source of Pythagoras' information. What we can discernfrom Wilken's work is that there was an ancient and noble civilization associated with theEuropean Megaliths that no longer exists and even its high knowledge and nuancedphilosophy has been forgotten - except for the clues left in the Iliad and Odyssey. It is afact that the Earth is literally blanketed with megaliths from some ancient civilization. Tensof thousands of them! There are variations in placement and style, but the thing they allhave in common is their incredible size and their undeniable antiquity. It is nowunderstood by the experts that the megalithic structures demanded complex architecturalplanning, and they propose that it was the labor of tens of thousands of men working forcenturies.

©n/a Stonehenge, the most famous megalithic structure.

No one has ever made a systematic count of the megaliths, but the estimate goes beyond50,000. It is also admitted that this figure represents only a fraction, since many have beendestroyed not only by the forces of nature, but also by the wanton destruction of man.Even though there are megalithic monuments in locations around the world, there isnothing anywhere else like there is in Europe. The megaliths of Europe form an"enormous blanket of stone." Great mounds of green turf or gleaming white quartzpebbles formerly covered many of them. The megalithic mania of ancient Europe is:

"Unparalleled indeed in human history. For there has never been anything like thisrage, almost mania, for megalith building, except perhaps during the centuries after

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AD 1000 when much the same part of Europe was covered with what a monk of thetime called a 'white mantle of churches.' [...]

"The megaliths, then, were raised by some of the earliest Europeans. The reason thatthis simple fact took so long to be accepted was the peculiar inferiority complexwhich western Europeans had about their past. Their religion, their laws, their culturalheritage, their very numerals, all come from the East. The inhabitants, beforecivilisation came flooding in from the Mediterranean, were illiterate; they kept norecords, they built no cities. It was easy to assume that they were simply bands ofhowling half-naked savages who painted their bodies, put bear-grease on their hairand ate their cousins." (Reader's Digest, The World's Last Mysteries, 1977.)

The interesting thing about the megalith builders is that the peoples who were able toperform these utterly amazing feats of engineering are still, in most circles, considered tobe barbarians because they did not build cities, engage in agriculture, develop the wheel,or writing. Yet, they did something that clearly cannot be, and was not, done by "civilized"peoples who did all of those "civilized" things. They had some sort of "power" that wecannot replicate and do not understand. We also note that another of the famousmegalithic arrangements is called "Carnac," suggesting that Karnak in what we now callEgypt is but an echo of an ancient reality, a name transferred by peoples on the move fromtheir ancient homes following a catastrophe, perhaps a terrible war such as that recordedof Troy.

What is also found in the same areas are many sculptures of female goddesses found inthe most ancient archaeological levels. According to the experts, the discernible idea of thereligion of the goddess is that of an infinite bounty of the Great Mother. It is proposed thatsuch peoples didn't engage in agriculture because the idea of "owning land" may havebeen abhorrent to them. The idea of "forcing" the earth to yield, rather than accepting thenatural abundance the Goddess provided was simply not a part of their philosophy. TheirGoddess was a Star Being, and she was worshipped in outdoor Temples that were laid outalong Celestial Archetypes. Iman Wilkens restores to us a fragment of True EuropeanHistory and perhaps it is time for us to turn our attention to trying to learn more about itin the proper context. After all, Judeo-Christianity has brought the world to the verge oftotal destruction in less than 2000 years. The Celtic cultures existed for many, manythousands of years, accomplishing great feats of engineering and producing a culture thatwas pre-eminent throughout the world until they were destroyed by the monotheisticinfection - due mainly to the fact that they did not accept a single, monolithic authority.Iman Wilkens book is filled with rich details and piles of supporting evidence thatincludes ancient historic writings, accurate geographic and topographic descriptionmatching, detailed maps, countless archaeological finds, historic place name matching,cultural and linguistic evidence. This book is a MUST read for everyone, most particularlypeople of European and Mediterranean heritage.

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Jupiter, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, andthe Return of the Mongols

By Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Regarding Iman Wilkens book, Where Troy Once Stood, this book was recommended to meby a Welsh reader. I tried for some time to obtain a copy and, failing to do so, the readerkindly lent me one. I looked at the book, read the blurbs on it, and said to myself: "Yeah,right! What a bunch of hooey this is going to be!" However, since we had just recentlymoved house and our furniture and books had not arrived yet, I was pretty much left withno other book in the house but this one. With a lifelong habit of reading daily, you couldalmost say that I was "forced" to read it in spite of an a priori attitude of extremeskepticism.

I was prepared with my pen and notebook for the long list of criticisms I was going towrite, but somehow, once I had started reading, the notebook never managed to fill up.Yes, there were things I thought could have been explained better if the author had beenaware of the history of cataclysms and global climate changes on the planet during theperiods he was concerned with, but for the most part, his approach and his logic werequite compelling, even if the evidence he collected was only circumstantial. Ancienthistory is a very difficult subject, but when so much evidence can be assembled to make acase, and a theory can be formed and tested successfully, then perhaps it is time to release"hardened categories" and long held beliefs in explanations that do not work.

As I have written elsewhere, historians of ancient times face two constant problems: thescarcity of evidence, and how to fit the evidence that IS known into the larger context ofother evidence, not to mention the context of the time to which it belongs.

Fortunately, ancient history is not "static" in the sense that we can say we know all there isto know now simply because the subject is about the "past." For example, theunderstanding of ancient history of our own fathers and grandfathers was, of necessity,more limited than our own due to the fact that much material has been discovered and hascome to light in the past two or three generations through archaeology and other historicalsciences.

Jews, Christians and Moslems have a certain notion of the past that is conveyed to them inhagiography, Bible stories, and the Koran, as well as in chronologies and historicalaccounts. We tend to accept all of these as "truth" - as chronological histories along withwhat else we know about history - and we often reject out-of-hand the idea that these mayall be legends and myths that are meta-historical - special ways of speaking about eventsin a manner that rises above history. They may also be mythicized history that must be

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carefully examined in a special way in order to extract the historical probabilities. Thechronologies, the way that we arrange dates and the antecedents that we assume forevents, should be of some considerable concern to everyone. If we can come to somereasonable idea of the REAL events, the "facts," the data that make up our view of theworld in which we live and our own place within it, then perhaps such facts about ourhistory can explain why our theologies and values tell us, not what we believe, but WHYwe believe what we do, and whether or not we ought really to discard those beliefs as"historical."

One could say, of course, that all history is a lie. Whenever we recount events or storiesabout people and times that are not immediately present to us, we are simply creating aPROBABLE picture of the past or a "distant happening." For most people, the horror andsuffering of the Iraqi people, at the present moment in "time," has no spatial meaningbecause it is "over there." It is quite easy for false images of such events to be created andmaintained as "history" by those who are not directly experiencing the events, particularlyif they are not told the truth about them by those who DO know. And so it has beenthroughout history.

An additional problem is that history not only is generally distorted by the victors, it isthen later "mythicized." There is a story found in the History of Herodotus, which is anexact copy of an older tale of Indian origin except for the fact that in the original, it was ananimal fable, and in Herodotus' version, all the characters had become human. In everyother detail, the stories are identical. Joscelyn Godwin quotes R. E. Meagher, professor ofhumanities and translator of Greek classics saying: "Clearly, if characters change species, theymay change their names and practically anything else about themselves."

Going further still, historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, clarifies for us the process of the"mythicization" of historical personages. Eliade describes how a Romanian folkloristrecorded a ballad describing the death of a young man bewitched by a jealous mountainfairy on the eve of his marriage. The young man, under the influence of the fairy wasdriven off a cliff. The ballad of lament, sung by the fiance, was filled with "mythologicalallusions, a liturgical test of rustic beauty." The folklorist, having been told that the songconcerned a tragedy of "long ago," discovered that the fiance was still alive and went tointerview her. To his surprise, he learned that the young man's death had occurred lessthan 40 years before. He had slipped and fallen off a cliff; in reality, there was no mountainfairy involved. Eliade notes that "despite the presence of the principal witness, a few yearshad sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendarytale." Even though the tragedy had happened to one of their contemporaries, the death ofa young man soon to be married "had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by itsidentification with the category of myth."

To the masses, hungry to create some meaning in their lives, the myth seemed truer, morepure, than the prosaic event, because "it made the real story yield a deeper and richermeaning, revealing a tragic destiny." We could even suggest that George Bush is viewed inthis way by many Americans who prefer to believe that he is a heroic president landing on

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aircraft carriers with verve and flair and a glint of steel in his eyes, protecting them fromevil terrorists when in fact, he is a cheap liar, a psychopath, and undoubtedly complicit incooking up the attack on the World Trade Center.

In the same way, a Yugoslavian epic poem celebrating a heroic figure of the fourteenthcentury, Marko Kraljevic, abolishes completely his historic identity, and his life story is"reconstructed in accordance with the norms of myth." His mother is a Vila, a fairy, and sois his wife. He fights a three-headed dragon and kills it, fights with his brother and killshim, all in conformity with classical mythic themes.

The historic character of the persons celebrated in epic poetry is not in question, Eliade notes."But their historicity does not long resist the corrosive action of mythicization." A historicevent, despite its importance, doesn't remain in the popular consciousness or memory intact.

The memory of the collectivity is anhistorical. Murko Chadwick, and other investigators ofsociological phenomena have brought out the role of the creative personality, of the"artist," in the invention and development of epic poetry. They suggest that there are "artists"behind this activity, that there are people actively working to modify the memory of historicalevents. Such artists are either naturally or by training, psychological manipulation adepts.They fully understand that the masses think in "archetypal models." The mass mindcannot accept what is prosaic and individual and preserves only what is exemplary. Thisreduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes, carried out by theconsciousness of the masses of peoples functions in conformity with archaic ontology. Wemight say that - with the help of the artist/poet or psychological manipulator - popularmemory is encouraged to give to the historical event a meaning that imitates an archetypeand reproduces archetypal gestures.

At this point, as Eliade suggests, we must ask ourselves if the importance of archetypes forthe consciousness of human beings, and the inability of popular memory to retainanything but archetypes, does not reveal to us something more than a resistance to historyexhibited by traditional spirituality?

What could this "something more" be?

I would like to suggest that it is best explained by the saying: "the victors write thehistory." This works because the lie is more acceptable to the masses since it generallyproduces what they would LIKE to believe rather than what is actually true. We havecertainly seen a few hints that this is exactly what George Bush and company are doing,and based on this "rewriting of the event" in real time wherein Bush is scripted as the starof the show and the recipient of a "directive from God," he has been able to further plansfor world-domination utilizing a religion that clearly is no different from other cults withthe exception that George Bush and cronies are the beneficiary.

Sounds a lot like what Stalin did in Russia, and what the CIA has been doing all over theplanet since WW II and certainly what monotheism has been doing for the past twothousand years. The fact is, manipulation of the mass consciousness is "standard operatingprocedure" for those in power. The priests of Judaism did it, Constantine did it,

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Mohammed did it, and the truth is, nothing has changed since those days except that themethods and abilities to manipulate the minds of the masses with "signs and wonders" hasbecome high tech and global in concert with global communication.

Getting back to Where Troy Once Stood, Iman Wilkens did his homework in a very creativeand open minded way. Among the things he examined in the Iliad and Odyssey were thesailing directions. Having a friend in the shipping industry who is a specialist in guidancesystems, I asked him a number of questions about this process and he confirmed thatWilkens approach and conclusions were correct. He also concentrated on the geographyand spatial locations of Homer's world. Iman Wilkens tells us:

As work on Homer's puzzle progressed, it turned out that many towns, islands andcountries were not yet known in the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the TrojanWar by the names mentioned by the poet.

Places like Thebes, Crete, Lesbos, Cyprus and Egypt had entirely different names inthe Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeological research. The theatre ofHomer's epics can therefore never have been in the Mediterranean, just as, say anepic found in the United States about a Medieval war, mentioning European place-names (which can be found in both countries) could not have taken place there, asthe American continent had not yet been discovered!

As to Homer's place names, we are confronted with a similar problem but it is notreally surprising that such a fundamental error in chronology could persist for some2,700 years as traditional beliefs handed down over a long period are seldomchallenged: each generation simply repeats the teachings of the previous onewithout asking itself the proper questions.

But now that this problem of timing has come to light, we are obliged to look forHomer's places elsewhere than the eastern Mediterranean, and situated near theocean and its tides, in particular where dykes prevented low-lying areas fromflooding. In other words: we have to look for Homer's places along the Atlantic coast.

The outcome of this research will be unsettling to many and I also realize from myown experience that it takes some time to get accustomed to the Bronze Agegeography of Europe. The best way of adjusting is by reading Homer together withthe explanations and maps of this book. Those who remain sceptical should realizethat the problem of place-name chronology in general and the phenomenon ofoceanic tides in particular, exclude any alternative solution. [...]

At first sight it seems impossible to penetrate such a very distant past, but it turns outto be still feasible to discover what happened over 3,000 years ago, and preciselywhere, thanks to the branch of linguistics dealing with the history of word forms -etymology.

While the Greek spelling of Homer's geographical names was fixed once and for allwhen the poems were written down ... place names in western Europe went onchanging in accordance with more or less well-established etymological rules, to befixed by spelling only relatively recently.

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Taking this fact into account, we shall see how virtually 400 odd Homeric place-names can be matched in a coherent and logical fashion with western Europeanplace-names as we know them today. Many of them are still easily recognizable,others very much less so, often because they have changed by invaders speaking adifferent language.

Even over the last few centuries, some place-names around the world have changedbeyond recognition, due to pronunciation by peoples of different languages. Who,for example, would believe that Brooklyn in New York comes from the Dutch placename Breukelen, if it were not a documented fact?

While it is not possible to prove anything that occurred more than 3,000 years ago, Ihope that my detective work has at least produced sufficient circumstantial evidenceto convince the readers that the famous city of Troy was situated in western Europe.[...]

The reason for the longevity of place names in general and river names in particularis that conquerors generally adopt the already-existing name, although oftenmodified or adapted to their own tongue.

A major exception to this rule is Greece, where invaders arriving in a country almostemptied of its population gave new names to many places - names familiar to themand appearing in Homer's works. But people arriving in a new and sparselypopulated country of course give familiar names to places in a haphazard kind ofway.

In Australia, for example, Cardiff, Gateshead, Hamilton, Jesmond, Stockton, Swansea,and Walsend, widely scattered in Britain, are all suburbs of Newcastle, New SouthWales. It is precisely this haphazard transposition of names that explains, for example,why Rhodes is an island in Greece, but a region in Homer; Euboea is another Greekisland, but part of the continent in Homer; Chios yet another island, but not in Homer.Similarly, Homer speaks of an island called Syria which clearly cannot be Syros in theCyclades. The reader may object that these are simply imprecisions due to theextreme antiquity of the text. But we have evidence that the present Egypt, Cyprus,Lesbos and Crete, all names appearing in Homer, were not known by those names inthe Bronze Age.

The list of such anomalies is long. Even the identification of such Homeric places asIthaca and Pylos has led to endless and inconclusive discussion among scholars andthe difficulty of making sense of Homer in Greece or Turkey is brought out in recentstudies by Malcolm Wilcock and G.S. Kirk. It is therefore clear that the poet, though heuses names we recognize, was not talking about the places that now bear thosenames. [Where Troy Once Stood, Wilkens, p. 52-53]

Iman Wilkens cites the now very long list of reasons why Turkey is excluded as the site ofTroy. (I'm not going to deal with those issues here; the reader may wish to pursue that lineof research on their own.) Additionally, he points out the many reasons that support thelocation of the Troad in a country with a temperate climate, open to the Atlantic, and withtides. As Wilkens noted, considering the internal evidence of Homer's works, it is onlylogical to look for the Troad in Europe, in a country formerly inhabited by the Celts, with

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an Atlantic climate, separated from the Continent by the sea, and having on its east coast abroad plain with a large bay capable of sheltering a big fleet of ships. In England, there is,as it happens, an area corresponding perfectly to ALL of the descriptions in Homer - theEast Anglian plain between the city of Cambridge and the Wash. Wilkens brings up acompelling argument:

Homer names no less than fourteen rivers in the region of Troy, eight of them beinglisted together in the passage where he describes how, after the Trojan War, theviolence of these rivers in flood sweeps away the wood and stone rampart builtround the Achaean encampment and the ships. It appears that generations ofreaders must have skipped over these lines, thinking they contained fictitious namesof no interest, for otherwise, it is difficult to understand how nobody, not evenpeople from the Cambridge area, was ever struck by the resemblance between thenames of Homer's rivers and those of this area.

Have a look at this list of river names, keeping in mind the several thousand years thathave passed and that these changes are quite in line with phonetic changes according tothe rules of etymology:

Usual Rendering of the Greek RiverName from Homer

Modern Name of the CorrespondingRiver in England

Aesepus Ise

Rhesus Rhee

Rhodius Roding

Granicus Granta

Scamander Cam

Simois Great Ouse

Satniois Little Ouse

Larisa Lark

Caystrius or CaysterYare with Caister-on-sea and Caistorcastle at the mouth

Thymbre Thet

Caresus Hiz

Heptaporus Tove

Callicolone Colne

Cilla Chillesford

Temese Thames

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As Wilkens notes, it is impossible to find these rivers in Turkey. All that can be found arefour rivers that were later given Homeric names without regard to the geographicaldescriptions in the Iliad.

The evidence that the Trojan plain is the East Anglian plain is also backed up by Homer'sdescriptions of the land: fertile soil, rich land, water meadows, flowering meadows, fineorchards, fields of corn, and many other details that perfectly describe England, but haveabsolutely no relationship to Turkey, either in modern or ancient times, as the archaeologydemonstrates.

There still exists very substantial remains of two enormousearth ramparts, running parallel with one another, to thenortheast of Cambridge, one twelve kilometers long andthe other fifteen.

The ditches dug in front of the dykes are on the side facinginland, not towards the sea, which means that they werebuilt by invaders, not defenders exactly as described byHomer. These are known today as Fleam Dyke and Devil'sDyke.

As Wilkens notes, it is obvious that the invader who builtthese enormous defenses was planning on a long siege.Also, a very large army would have been needed to move

the huge volume of earth that went into creating these dykes which are 20 meters high and30 meters wide at the base. Therefore, it seems that the estimated number of combatants inthe Achaean army - between 65,000 and 100,000 - might not be an exaggeration.

The two dykes are about 10 km apart, leaving room for the deployment of two largearmies if the defenders were to breach the first rampart. A line drawn perpendicularlythrough the two dykes, extending inland, cuts through the highest hill in the Cambridgearea now known as the Wandlebury Ring, part of a plateau called the Gog Magog Hills.Wilkens produces still another confirmation:

A second indication that Wandlebury was the site of Troy is provided by a furtherdetail of Homer's text, where he tells how the Trojan army, before the construction ofthe dykes, gathered on a small isolated hill before Troy:

Now there is before the city a steep mound afar out in the plain, with a clear spaceabout it on this side and on that; this do men verily call Batieia, but the immortals callit the barrow of Myrine, [an Amazon] light of step. There on this day did the Trojansand their allies separate their companies. [Iliad, II, 811-815]

Some kilometers to the north of Wandlebury, there is indeed, an isolated hill wherethe village of Bottisham now stands. It seems permissible to associate the Homericname of Batieia with that of Bottis(ham). [...]

When Priam, with a herald, is on his way from Troy to the Achaean camp by the sea toask Achilles to return the body of his son, Hector, they apparently follow the course of

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the Scamander and stop to water their horses at another place that is of greatinterest to us:

When the others had driven past the great barrow of Ilus, they halted the mules andthe horses in the river to drink, for darkness was by now come down over the earth...[Iliad, XXIV, 349-351]

A modern map shows us that half way between where Troy was and the Achaeancamp, on the river Cam, lies the small town of Ely, which very likely owes its name toIlus, and ancestor of Priam and the founder of Troy. It may well be, therefore, that thegreat gothic cathedral of Ely was built on the site where Homer saw the tomb of thefirst Trojan king. [Wilkens]

According to the tale, after ten years of war and countless deaths, Troy was essentiallywiped off the face of the earth. Obviously, everybody didn't die but the silting of the Washmade it impossible to rebuild on the same site at that time, assuming that the survivorshad the heart to do so. A new city was built on the Thames at Ilford, or the Ford of Iliumeast of the present City of London. The Romans called this city Londinium Troia Nova, or"New Troy." It was also known as Trinobantum, and the Celts called it Caer Troia, or "Townof Troy."

Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that New Troy was founded by Brutus in 1100 BC. Thatwould certainly put the "real Trojan War" quite a bit earlier than most "experts" consider tobe the appropriate temporal placement of this war. The Hon. R.C. Neville found glassobjects from the eastern Mediterranean which were dated as being from the fifteenthcentury BC about 5 km from Wandlebury Ring. Objects of a similar date and origin havealso been found in other parts of England, showing that there was trade between theAtlantic and Mediterranean peoples.

To suppose that the great cultures in the eastern Mediterranean area and in the NearEast were separated from each other, in the beginning, by the broadest of gulfs, is aninterpretation wholly at variance with the facts. On the contrary, it has been clearlyenough established that we have to deal, in this region, with an original or basic ifnot uniform culture, so widely diffused that we may call it Afrasian." [A. W. Persson]

There are two figures of the giants Gog and Magog that strike the hours on a clock atDunstan-in-the West, Fleet Street, but few people in London seem to know why they arethere. Adrian Gilbert writes in The New Jerusalem:

Once more we have to go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth's book, in which there is astory of how, when Brutus and his Trojans arrived in Britain, they found the islandsparsely inhabited by a race of giants. One of these, called Gogmagog, wrestled witha Trojan hero called Corineus and was eventually thrown to his death from a cliff-topcalled in consequence 'Gogmagog's Leap'.

In the 1811 translation into English of Brut Tysilio, a Welsh version of the chroniclestranslated by the Rev. Peter Roberts, there is a footnote suggesting that Gogmagog isa corrupted form of Cawr-Madog, meaning 'Madog the great' or 'Madog the giant' inWelsh. [...]

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In another version of the Gogmagog tale, the Recuyell des histories de Troye, Gogand Magog are two separate giants. In this story they are not killed but brought backas slaves by Brutus to his city of New Troy. Here they were to be employed asgatekeepers, opening and closing the great gates of the palace.

The story of Gog and Magog, the paired giants who worked the gates of London, wasvery popular in the middle ages and effigies of them were placed on the city gates atleast as early as the reign of Henry VI. These were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666,but so popular were they that new ones were made in 1708 and installed at theGuildhall. This pair of statues was destroyed in 1940 during the Blitz, the third greatfire of London, when the roof and much of the interior furnishings of the Guildhallwere burnt. A new pair of the statues was carved to replace them when the Guildhallwas repaired after the war. [pp. 60-61]

In the above quote, we have a clue that the giants, Gog and Magog, were known to thepeople of England long before they had access to a Bible, so certainly the Gog Magog hillswere not named after the war described by Ezekiel. Rather, Ezekiel must have knownabout the terrible conflict fought on the Gog Magog plateau.

The question that is often asked is: could there have been cities of as many as 100,000inhabitants in England during the Bronze Age? The population definitely fluctuated overtime, but archaeologists estimate a population of at least 3 million at the close of theBronze Age. According to some experts, England was a populous country with welldeveloped agriculture at that time. We read in the Iliad about orchards, vines and fields ofcorn.

About 2000 BC came Bell-beaker people, whose burials are in single graves, withindividual grave-goods. The remarkable Wessex Culture of the Bronze Age whichappears about 1500 BC is thought to be based on this tradition. The grave-goodsthere suggest the existence of a warrior aristocracy 'with a graded series ofobligations of service... through a military nobility down to the craftsmen andpeasants', as in the Homeric society. This is the sort of society which is described inthe Irish sagas, and there is no reason why so early a date for the coming of the Celtsshould be impossible. ...There are considerations of language and culture that rathertend to support it. [ M. Dillon and N. Chadwick, The Celtic Realms, Weidenfield andNicolson, London, 1972]

If it is so that Troy was in England, then the first documented King of England was Priam -in the Bronze Age. It also explains why prehistoric spiral labyrinths engraved on rocks orlaid out on the ground with stones are still called "Troy Towns" or "walls of Troy" inEngland, "Caerdroia" in Wales and "Trojaborgs" in Scandinavia.

There is more than a symbolic relationship between the spiral maze or labyrinths and thecity of Troy. According to K. Kerenyi, the root of the word truare means "a circularmovement around a stable centre." Based on the archaeological evidence, the symbolismof the circular labyrinth is far older than Homer's time, reaching back into the Stone Age.

Having discovered that there is good reason to believe the Troy was situated in England,we next must consider now the identification and locations of the Achaeans. As Wilkens

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has noted:

Places like Thebes, Crete, Lesbos, Cyprus and Egypt had entirely different names inthe Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeological research. The theater ofHomer's epics can therefore never have been in the Mediterranean, just as, say anepic found in the United States about a Medieval war, mentioning European place-names (which can be found in both countries) could not have taken place there, asthe American continent had not yet been discovered!

So, if the Egypt that we know was not Egypt at that time, where was it? Also, where wasthe land of the Achaeans?

If fourteen rivers in the same region of England correspond linguistically andgeographically with those of the Trojan plain as described by Homer, the coincidenceis so great that it cannot be accidental, and we must indeed be talking about thesame plain. ... At the end of the Iliad, Homer states explicitly where Troy was located,speaking through the voice of Achilles talking to the old King Priam, come to claimthe body of his son, Hector:

And of thee, old sire, we hear that of old thou was blest; how of all that toward thesea Lesbos, the seat of Macar encloseth, and Phrygia in the upland, and theboundless Hellespont, over all these folk, men say, thou, old sire, was pre-eminent byreason of thy wealth and thy sons. [Iliad, XXIV, 543-546]

This does seem to delimit Priam's kingdom fairly precisely, and these places areindeed now to be found in the Mediterranean. Lesbos is a Greek island off the Turkishcoast, Phrygia is the high plateau of western Turkey and the Hellespont is the classicalname for the Strait of the Dardanelles. It is precisely this description that inspiredSchliemann to seek the ruins of Troy in a plain in northwest Turkey. [Wilkens]

Considering the fact that the archaeological evidence of the many levels of the "Troy" thatSchliemann discovered simply do not support all the details of the story of the Trojan war,I agree with Wilkens that it seems that there was a general shift of Homeric place-namesfrom western Europe to the Mediterranean after the end of the Bronze Age.

The sea upon which the Troad lay was called the Hellespont. This means the "Sea ofHelle." According to legend, Helle was a girl who fell from the back of a winged ram anddrowned in the sea which was then named after her. She was the daughter of Athamas,King of Orchomenus and the sister of Phrixus.

The name Hel, or Helle is also written as El or Elle by those linguistic groups that do notpronounce the "H." It is a word of very ancient Indo-European origin. Not only was El thename of the principal god of the pantheon of Ugarith, the ancient Syrian town on theMediterranean, but "el" also means "god" in the Semitic languages.

The atlas of Europe contains so many place-names beginning with Hel, Helle, El and Ellethat it is well worth having a look: (I apologize that the scan of the map is so difficult toread due to the contrast, but the idea can be gotten by having a look and then furtherexamination of an atlas will provide additional evidence.)

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Apart from the waters off the western tip of France, still called Chenal de la Helle, thename Hellespont or Helle Sea has disappeared from western Europe. But, there are goodreasons to think that it must have been the name of the sea on the shores of which so manyplaces named "Helle" remain. Also, there still remain an estuary in the Rhine delta calledHellegat, or "Gate to Helle," while the origin of the name of the French resort of Houlgateon the Channel coast is undoubtedly Hellegat. The name of the port of Hull on thenortheast coast of England comes from the word "hell" according to the Oxford dictionaryof English Etymology. Additionally, the name of Broceliande, the vast forest of Paimpont

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in Brittany, known from the cycle of the Knights of the Round Table is "Bro-Hellean" inArmorican Breton, meaning "Land near Hell."

It therefore seems logical to conclude that Homer's vast Hellespont was not thenarrow strait of the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey, but the sea separatingEngland from the continent of Europe, in other words, the Channel, the North Seaand the Baltic, all the more so because the Greek adjective used to describe theHellespont, apeiros, is much stronger than 'vast': it means 'boundless' which can onlyapply to the seas off the western shores of Europe, or, in other words, the Atlantic.[Wilkens]

Phrygia is the second frontier of the Troad mentioned by Homer and he describes it as an"upland." We can look for the etymology of the word Phrygia in both the name of theNorse goddess Freya, and the name Phrixos, the brother of Helle. The name of thekingdom of their father was Orchomenus and there is, in fact, a place in west Scotlandcalled Orchy, and on the north of Scotland there are the Orkney Islands, the archaicspelling of which is Orcheny. In the Orkneys, there is a town named Aith, the same as thename of Agamemnon's horse. Following the principles of etymology, we even find thename of King Athamos preserved: Atham > Ethem > Eden> Edin > Edinburgh.

Many recent archaeological finds give evidence of big farms in Scotland dating as far backas 4000 BC, witness to an advanced culture that subsequently spread to the south of GreatBritain.

Lesbos would then be the Isle of Wight. The name of the main river on the Isle of Wight isMedina, cognate with the Greek Methymna. The narrow strait separating the Isle from themainland is called the Solent, related to the Greek noun solen which means channel orstrait. Maps of the island show a promontory known as Egypt point.

According to Homer, Egypt is only a few days voyage from Troy. And so, if Troy was inEngland, Egypt must not be far away. Somewhere in western Europe there must be aregion that subsequently gave its Bronze Age name to the land of the Pharaohs downsouth in Africa much later.

At the time of Homer, the land of the Pharaohs was not called Egypt, but Misr, Al-Khem orKemi and often Meroë. This latter name applied to Upper Egypt and what is now calledEthiopia. The biblical name for Egypt was Mitsrayim which is still modern Hebrew forEgypt. Since its independence, the official Arabic name for Egypt has returned to Masr.

It was Herodotus, the first Greek to visit the pyramids who first called the Land of thePharaohs by a name taken from Homer, Egypt. Alexander the Great made this the officialname of the country in 332 BC. In other words, the Greeks did exactly what all colonialistsdo: they gave familiar names to places in their colonies and imposed their language on thepeoples by virtue of making it the language of administration.

What is evident is that Homer's description of Egypt does not at all match the features ofthe Land of the Pharaohs. This was noted by the Greek Philosopher Eratosthenes wholived in Alexandria. (284-192 BC)

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Homer uses Egypt to designate a "river fed by the water of the sky" and sometimes thesurrounding country with its "fine fields." But he never, ever, mentions the pyramidswhich were, supposedly, already thousands of years old at the time of the Trojan War.Additionally, the pyramids are not mentioned by Aeschylus in his drama The Suppliants,the subject of which is the Druidic tradition from the north. He tells us how the suppliants,a group of fifty young women who wish to escape forced marriages, flee Egypt "across thesalty waves to reach the land of Argos." Later in the play, he writes how the young Io,pursued by a gadfly, returns from Argos to Egypt and "arrived in the holy land of Zeus, richin fruits of all sorts, in the meadows fed by the melting snow and assailed by the fury of Typhon, onthe banks of the Nile whose waters are always pure."

Doesn't sound much like Egypt, does it?

As those of you who have studied geography realize, Argos has never been part of, or nearto, Egypt as we now know it. Furthermore, Egypt - as we now know it - was the land ofRa, the Sun God and, in ancient Egypt, Zeus was completely unknown. Finally, meadowswatered by melting snow never, in any way, could describe the land we now know asEgypt.

So, since the Egypt described by both Homer and Aeschylus do not fit the Egypt we nowknow, and we don't think they would have forgotten to mention the chief feature of Egypt- the pyramids - we must conclude that they were not talking about the Egypt we know asEgypt today.

Zeus was certainly known to France to the extent that one day of the week, Jeudi, orThursday, comes from his name. It is the right distance from Troy, but, as Wilkens pointsout, we don't find much etymologically speaking, to support the idea that Egypt wasFrance. However, there are a few clues.

As it happens, there is a town and branch of the Nile in present day Egypt that the Greekscalled Bolbitiron and Bobitinon. Correspondingly, there is a town called Bolbec near themouth of the Seine. Then, there is a river in France called the Epte. This river flows fromthe north to join the Seine near Vernoin, half-way between Paris and Rouen.

There are many etymological artifacts of the name of the Nile in France where manyvillages contain -nil- (French for Nile) in their names. There is Mesnil, near Le Havrewhich, in twelfth-century church Latin was called "mas-nilii" or "house in the Nilecountry.. Then there is Miromesnil, Ormesnil, Frichemesnil, Longmesnil, Vilmesnil, and soon. Menilmontant, or "house on the upper Nile" is a district in Paris, and there is a suburbcalled Blanc-Mesnil. The god of the Nile had a daughter called Europe whose name ispreserved in the river Eure, a southern confluent of the Seine.

At the time of the Pharoahs, in what we now know as Egypt, the Nile was called Ar orAur. During the periods when it flooded, it was called Hape the Great.

Homer mentions a town in Egypt, Thebes, which cannot be the same town we know inEgypt which was, during the time of the Pharaohs known as Wase or Wo-se. It was onlyeight centuries after Homer that the Greeks gave it the new name of Thebes.

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Utilizing the principles of etymology, Wilkens suggests that Homer's Thebes is now calledDieppe.

According to etymological dictionaries the 'd' was formerly pronounced 't' and thename is connected with the Germanic tief (English 'deep') for the harbour lies deep inthe country. Let us recall that Homer, who always chose sound and concisedescriptions, speaks of a country of 'fair fields' and a 'heaven fed' river. Dieppe'shinterland is a beautiful farming region and the rain is never far awary in this part ofFrance. What is more, recent archeological research has revealed that large farmsexisted in many parts of France in the Celtic period, so well-kept fields were a featureof the countryside even in that remote era. [...]

The initial evidence found so far is thus in favour of identifying the Bronze Age Egyptas corresponding approximately to the present department of Seine-Maritime.[Wilkens]

Continued...

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